Blank Check

Rupert Wainwright, 1994
Rotten Tomatoes score: 11%

What a great tag line they came up with for this poster. "Similar to Home Alone!"

Blank Check is the kind of movie where every plot element seems to have been invented to explain away the implausibility of some other plot element. I think of it as a "Let's Say" plot:

* * * * * * * * *

Let's make a movie where a kid suddenly becomes a millionaire by accident.

Okay, but how could that happen?

Let's say some rich person gives him a blank check without realizing it.

But wouldn't that make the kid a thief?

Well, let's say the rich person is a criminal, so the stealing doesn't seem so wrong.

All right, but hold on—no bank would ever cash a million-dollar check for a kid anyway.

It might if the bank manager is also a criminal, and he thinks the check is part of a money-laundering scam he's running.

And how is this kid going to explain to his parents and friends why he's suddenly rich?

Let's say he invents a cover story about a reclusive millionaire who just moved to town, and everyone believes the money belongs to this millionaire guy instead of the kid.

Good enough. That's a go picture.

* * * * * * * * *

Speaking of plausibility, I saw this movie when I was ten, and even then, it was painfully obvious to me that you could not really buy anywhere near this much stuff with a million-dollar check. Why didn't they make it ten million? But I guess then it would be even more unbelievable that the bank covers this enormous check for a child.

To fill in the gaps in my hypothetical movie pitch above, the hero of this story is Preston Waters, a ten-year-old kid whose nose-to-the-grindstone workaholic dad never gives him a break. He makes Preston share his brand new Macintosh™ computer with his bullying older brothers who have recently started their own business. And when Preston nearly gets run over by a fugitive mob boss named Quigley (Miguel Ferrer), all the dad cares about is that Preston allowed his bike to get damaged in the accident.

What dad doesn't know is that Quigley, desperate to flee the scene before the police showed up, cut Preston a signed blank check to settle the incident. So Preston fills in the check for one million dollars and carries it to his local bank.

Through a preposterous series of coincidences, the money-laundering bank manager (Michael Lerner) assumes that Preston is a courier for Quigley, and he gives the boy a million dollars in small bills. For the next 70 minutes or so, Quigley, the banker, and a hit man named Juice (Tone Lōc) ineffectually chase after Preston while Preston wastes no time spending his windfall on junk food and expensive toys...

...and a mansion, and a private limousine, and catered black-tie parties, and dinner dates. I have to admit, these aren't the things I would have spent a million dollars on when I was a kid. Gene Siskel, in his review, said that Preston should have been spending his money on box seats at baseball games. That strikes me as a very 1950s ideal of boyhood, but I agree that most children are not interested in expensive real estate or fancy restaurants.

Nor are they especially interested in wooing 30-year-old undercover FBI agents (even if they are played by Karen Duffy). And what the heck is Agent Shay Stanley doing going on a date with Preston? She's ostensibly using Preston to get the goods on "Mr. Macintosh", the straw millionaire Preston has dreamed up as a cover story, but this whole subplot is just weird.

I preferred the limo driver played by Rick Ducommun, filling the role of the goofball adult that the kid hero can relate to. The relationship between Preston and Henry is the closest thing this movie has to character development, and the scene at the end where Henry subtly reveals that he knows the truth about Mr. Macintosh just barely misses the mark.

Significantly wider of the mark are the three boneheaded crooks. Characters like this appeared in practically every kids' movie in those days, so I shouldn't be surprised to see them, but nothing about these guys lands. Miguel Ferrer as Quigley is much too sinister—he plays the part well enough, but did we really need a scene where Quigley threatens to throw Preston's loudmouth classmate off a skyscraper? (And what is a skyscraper doing in Nowheresville, Indiana?) Michael Lerner is one of our most underrated actors, but he does nothing but bumble his way through this picture, and Tone Lōc's trademark gravelly voice is phoned in as well.

Before the crooks can corner Preston for a sequence of Home Alone style pratfalls, Preston has to learn a hard lesson about the value of a million dollars. The organizer of his lavish dinner party gives him a $100,000 invoice, which finally breaks the bank of Macintosh. This, of course, raises the plausibility concern I mentioned earlier: it is blatantly obvious that the kid has spent far more than a million dollars up to this point, but the movie wants us to believe that his account has just now run dry.

We even catch a glimpse of Preston's expense report, which is remarkable primarily for the light it sheds on the number of plot changes this movie must have gone through in post-production. Preston's computer screen shows a debit of $300,000 for "Plan 442," which refers to a business project his father was struggling to get off the ground earlier in the movie. Evidently, on some long-forgotten cutting-room floor, there was a scene where Preston had Mr. Macintosh cut his dad a check for 300 grand. This seems like an important plot point, and it's bizarre that the finished movie still briefly alludes to Plan 442, only to drop the subject immediately.

It's also bizarre that the expense report doesn't show the $300,000 Preston spent on the gigantic castle he's been living in. I have to conclude that, in an earlier cut of the film, Preston somehow acquired the house for free and spent that money on dad's business deal. It's also obvious that the exorbitant house party was originally scripted to cost only $10,000, but then, what's 90 thou here or there when you're a one-millionaire?

So the party falls apart when Mr. Macintosh can't foot the bill, and that leaves the house wide open for the villains to chase Preston around while he subjects them to water slides and pitching-machine-fired baseballs to the groin. This sequence only lasts a few minutes, as if they included it solely to satisfy the requirements of the genre. The FBI shows up to spoil the party, and Quigley claims to be the real Mr. Macintosh.

The FBI agents apparently believe him and arrest him for all the terrible, terrible white-collar crimes they suspect Macintosh of committing. This is stupid, because the authorities will very quickly discover that he is a recent prison escapee named Quigley and not an imaginary person named Macintosh, but as long as that happens off-screen, we don't have to care.

---

Overall, I would call this another premise in search of a plot. There's clearly something in this concept, but the movie never quite finds it. Anyway, it's not horrible, so Let's Say it's