Cinema: Skinned Knees

SKATEBOARD

Directed by George Gage Screenplay by Richard A. Wolf and George Gage

Skateboarding is potentially a lovely subject for a movie. All those healthy, graceful kids whirligigging around on alarming little platforms on wheels; the opportunities for handsome photography and creative editing appear to be endless. Unfortunately, this first attempt to capitalize on a fad that has become a sport realizes almost none of that potential.

The blame for the failure must be equally divided between a feebly developed script and stupefying direction. The basic story is a Bad News Bears knockoff. A down-on-his-luck Hollywood talent agent (Allen Garfield) becomes fascinated by skateboarding kids as he commutes to and from the unemployment office. He decides to organize a team to put on exhibitions and enter the competitions that are a growing part of this phenomenon. Pressed by a gambler to pay off a debt, he unpleasantly pushes the kids, loses his star on the eve of the big down hill race but sees the substitute come from behind to win.

Garfield works hard, not to say desperately in this role, but the film's writers do not develop his relationship with his team beyond the whining and hectoring stage, and there is nothing touching or comic in their pointless dialogue.

The youngsters' characters are hardly sketched in at all. A possible romance be tween Garfield and the team's nurse-chaperone (Kathleen Lloyd) is also left hanging vaguely in air. The team's adventures on the road are neither funny nor harrowing. Even the racing scenes are suspenselessly developed to resemble all the other skateboarding sequences; no where is there any pace, style or excitement. One can only hope that this bad, visibly cheap film will not entirely preempt further explorations of a curious little world. There is still a good movie in it somewhere.

−Richard Schickel