The 1986 Whoopi Goldberg Vehicle Jumping Jack Flash is Anything But a Gas, Gas, Gas

I’m fascinated by the decade Whoopi Goldberg spent following the extraordinary success of The Color Purple starring in ill-fated high-concept vehicles of varying degrees of idiocy. 

Goldberg’s movies from this period weren’t all flops or commercial disappointments, of course. Sister Act was a monster hit and its sequel didn’t fare poorly at the box-office either. 

But it’s telling that Goldberg’s two other biggest successes from this period both found her in supporting roles. Goldberg scored the biggest success of her career and won an Academy Award that eventually put her in the elite and exclusive EGOT club with 1990’s Ghost and had a major supporting role in The Player as an eccentric detective. 

In the height of the Reagan era Goldberg represented something new and unprecedented in the world of American movies: an instant movie star who was a dark skinned, androgynous African American woman who was not conventionally attractive and, for good measure, had a Jewish last name. 

Movies were not written for black women, or women in the 1980s so a lot of Goldberg’s vehicles were originally conceived for white actors and actresses. Sister Act, for example, was initially supposed be a Bette Midler movie. Goldberg did a fine job in the role, of course, but it’s very easy to imagine Midler in the role. Her Judaism would have lent an additional culture clash element to her character going undercover as a nun. 

1987’s Fatal Beauty was originally a Cher vehicle written and directed by John Millius before Cher and Milius both parted, Goldberg took over the lead and Child’s Play director Tom Holland replaced Millius. 

1987’s Burglar found Goldberg playing a character that was a white man in the Lawrence Block novels that inspired the film and was originally going to be played by Bruce Willis. 

The uniquely ill-fated 1988 flop The Telephone, which was written by Harry Nilsson and Terry Southern and directed by Rip Torn (yes, the Harry Nilsson, Terry Southern and Rip Torn) was likewise conceived as a Robin Williams movie. 

Goldberg’s first post-The Color Purple vehicle, 1986’s Jumping Jack Flash went through all sorts of different iterations. At one point Bruce Reynolds was going to direct, only to drop out and be replaced by Howard Zieff. 

Zieff, meanwhile, was fired well into production and replaced by Penny Marshall in her directorial debut. 

Shelley Long was supposed to play the lead role before Goldberg ended up making this her follow-up to her breakthrough film, a breakthrough film that, it should be noted, was a very heavy drama and not the kind of light, stupid comedy Goldberg would spend the next ten years making.  

Goldberg is stranded in the thankless role of Terry Doolittle. She’s an employee at a futuristic bank that uses this stunning, incredible technology called computers and deals with accounts all over the world. 

It’s a boring job that Terry is very good at but she finds her professional existence boring and unsatisfying. Plus, the screenwriters (who include Charles and Nancy Meyers) make Terry a fan of movies, music and books so we know that she has a big imagination and is ready for adventure because she’s into entertainment like Casablanca (she has a poster in her apartment) and the band The Rolling Stones, whose music, most notably the title song, figures prominently in the proceedings. 

One typically dull day at work Terry gets a cryptic message from a mysterious stranger who goes bu the name Jumping Jack Flash. He’s a British intelligence officer being pursued by the KGB. 

If I received that kind of message I’d tell the person sending it to get bent. But this was the 1980s, when every American inexplicably felt that they had a personal obligation to help us win the Cold War. 

Also, as I’ve already established, Terry is very bored. So she figures out her exciting new online friend’s cryptic riddles and follows his equally enigmatic instructions.

A lot of Jumping Jack Flash consists of Goldberg talking to herself as she tries to figure out what’s going on and what role she is supposed to play in this unexpected international game of spy craft and intrigue or talking at computers while she acts as Jumping Jack Flash’s agent in the States. 

Jumping Jack Flash is so maddeningly convoluted that eighty percent of the runtime is devoted to a needlessly complicated plot that it is difficult to follow and damn near impossible to care about. 

Like many of the vehicles that would follow, at least one of which paired Goldberg with a bumbling anthropomorphic dinosaur in the future Jumping Jack Flash has no idea how to use Goldberg or what her strengths are. 

Goldberg, like her Comic Relief cohort Robin Williams, was a live-wire, electric performer with a mind and an imagination that never stopped firing on all cylinders. Also like Williams, she was a gifted, Academy Award-winning dramatic actor who excelled in character parts. 

Yet Jumping Jack Flash disastrously casts Goldberg in the milquetoast role of an underemployed everywoman who doesn’t have anyone to play off of since she spends most of the film monologuing forgettably. 

Incidentally David Mamet apparently wrote a draft of the screenplay that was characteristically profane but the genius who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross apparently didn’t do a good enough job so his screenplay was not used. 

I find that both sad and fascinating. Jumping Jack Flash is a snooze, snooze, snooze with almost nothing going for it. It’s a hopelessly bland take on the Hitchockian staple of the ordinary person who finds themselves suddenly swept up in a world of intrigue and danger that they can barely begin to comprehend. 

When Jumping Jack Flash does dream up some bit of comic business for its star the result is both underwhelming and embarrassing. At a crucial juncture, for example, she sneaks into a fancy party at a British consulate by showing up in a wig and fancy blue dress and claiming to be the evening’s entertainment. 

She’s curiously by herself rather than accompanied by her band mates yet she gains entry to the party all the same so that she can sneak off and do something riveting involving a computer. 

Why cast someone like Goldberg in the role of a computer drone who runs around New York following the instructions of her British ally?

James Belushi is one of a number of Saturday Night Live cast members who pop up in brief roles. Jumping Jack Flash is an action-comedy that frustratingly forgot to include any jokes or humor. Even more maddeningly, it’s short on action but long on plot and exposition. 

John Belushi’s less talented brother makes an impression in a brief appearance as a spy type who shows up to fix Terry’s computer then mysteriously disappears, only to reappear later driving a taxi that crashes. 

The filmmakers seem to have decided that if the screenplay was more or less devoid of comedy they could make the film funny by casting ringers like Phil Hartman, Carol Kane and Jon Lovitz to play Terry’s coworkers. 

Hartman’s defining characteristic is a love of weird Russian fitness shows that he somehow manages to pick up at the bank, which is a testament to just how deeply invested Jumping Jack Flash is in the Cold War. 

Belushi also appeared in The Man With One Red Shoe around this time so his agent apparently thought his future lie in supporting roles in annoyingly plot-heavy light spy comedies. 

Despite being glacially paced and no fun at all Jumping Jack Flash was a modest box office success and somehow got an A on Cinemascore from ordinary moviegoers with perversely low standards. 

With the exception of Sister Act, Goldberg’s subsequent vehicles didn’t learn from Jumping Jack Flash’s mistakes. Goldberg would still appear in movies but often as herself or in a bit part. 

Hollywood didn’t know what to do with a woman who looked and acted like Goldberg back when she broke through in the mid-1980s. It still doesn’t. 

Up next: Salvador