Gleaming the Cube

Another of the movies that started showing up in the FXM rotation a few months back that was new to me is Gleaming the Cube. It's on again tomorrow (Nov. 11) at 6:00 AM, so I recently watched it to do a post on it here.

Christian Slater plays Brian Kelly, a teenager in suburban southern California who's very much into skateboarding with his friends, so much so that it's put him into one of those groups that's one of the character types you'd see in 1980s teen movies. At home, Brian doesn't get along so well with his parents, mostly because a decade or so ago, they adopted a Vietnamese refugee boy about the same age as Brian named Vinh, and Brian thinks his parents care more about Vinh than they do about him.

Vinh works for Col. Trac, who makes his money from running a video store catering to all the Vietnamese immigrants in Orange County, but also runs a charity that collects medical aid for Vietnam as a sort of propaganda to show that the Communists can't run a country, Trac having fought for the South Vietnamese. Vinh's job is for the charity and not for the video store.

One day, in looking at the numbers, Vinh gets the distinct feeling that Col. Trac and the charity are getting fleeced by the medical supply provider as the numbers just don't add up. Rather than going to Trac, Vinh comes up with the idiotic idea of going to the supply house alone, and at night so he can break in. He doesn't get the answers to his questions as he's found out before he can learn the truth. His captors take him to a hotel room where they intend to inflict some light torture, but accidentally strangle him to death. So they stage it to look like suicide.

Art Lucero (Steven Bauer) believes that it's suicide, but the family is devastated and Brian certainly doesn't believe it's suicide, so he's going to start doing some investigating of his own, without letting the police know what's going on. This gets him pursued by the bad guys, and when he hides in a car to follow the bad guys, that driver gets killed.

But this doesn't deter Brian. Instead, Brian goes to the medical supply house himself, where he discovers that the charity is in fact running guns to some unmentioned rebels who I don't think ever existed in real life. In addition, he tries to get to know Trac's daughter, who is also about his and Vinh's age and goes to the same school, to the point that when she says they could never be friends because just look at him and his skater image, he decides to change his image to a preppy, to everybody's shock (and the start of the film's unintentional humor).

However, having discovered the guns, Brian is now in danger himself, and Lucero is getting really pissed about this snotty kid horning in on the police department's job. Brian sets up a diversion at the medical supply house that gets Lawndale (Richard Herd), the white American helping obtain those weapons for Trac and smuggle them to Southeast Asia to suspect Trac. Lucero, on the other hand, finally figures out what's going on, and this leads to the final showdown which involves Lawndale on one side, Lucero on another, and Brian and his friends -- who are now willing to believe in him even if he looks like a preppy -- on a third side. It's one of the more humorous car chases in the movies.

Gleaming the Cube is one of those movies that's not really covering any new ground. As I was watching it, I got the impression that the movie was one part Chinatown (the whole Los Angeles-based mystery, not the immigrant community); one part Scooby Doo (Lawndale would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling teenaged skateboarders), and one part Roller Boogie (some of the action scenes look like they could have been recreated from Roller Boogie, only with the characters on skateboards instead of roller skates). There's also some mild social commentary about the generational clash in immigrant communities that's always been a thing, going all the way back to the silent Jazz Singer. It's in many ways a standard-issue amateur detective movie that just moves the action to a few completely new sub-cultures.

Gleaming the Cube starts off a bit dumb, in that the characters act in ways that really make you suspend disbelief, but the movie picks up steam as it becomes increasingly more absurd, especially when it gets to the car chase. For example, Lucero commandeers a car that had a computer voice instructing passengers to fasten safety belts and things like that; the sort of technology that was considered cutting-edge and a big deal back in the 1980s. During the chase, the passenger door gets torn off, and for the rest of the chase, you can hear the computer voice intoning, "The right door is ajar".

Watch also for the skater who works as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut (and the Pizza Hut delivery truck!). That's a young Tony Hawk before he became a skateboarding legend. If you want an interesting look at 80s style and a sub-culture that didn't show up much on the screen in those days, you could do far worse than to watch Gleaming the Cube. Great it most certainly isn't, but it's incredibly entertaining.