Heat Vision and Jack
This review was comissioned by @krinsbez.
"Heat Vision and Jack" was a live action show pitch-and-pilot made in 1999 that - despite an all star cast and a fair amount of internet attention - never got picked up. For the last twenty-four years, it's just been a pilot. Creators Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon weren't as famous in 99 as they are now (especially Harmon, who has since layered Community and Rick & Morty under his belt), but they weren't total nobodies either. Coupling that with Ben Stiller as the director and Jack Black, Ron Silver, and Owen Wilson as starring actors, you'd think this would have been able to get SOME studio's attention, but I guess not.
That could be because it was bad, of course. But it could also be because studio execs are bad. There are, after all, many bad things in the world.
Let's see!
We open on Ben Stiller - who I thought was just the director, but apparently he actually appears onscreen for at least the intro - in a very weird office setup that invokes the Victorian era, complete with phrenology.
He gives us a very sardonic and semi-ironically egotistical rundown of his Hollywood career, and informs us that it was all just a buildup to this moment. Now, finally, with his hard-earned money fame and power, he can FINALLY direct a story about a superintelligent astronaut and his talking motorcycle.
I have genre related questions. I will reserve them for the time being.
I also assume that "Heat Vision" is the astronaut and "Jack" is the talking motorcycle, but it's not an assumption I'm going to lean too heavily on.
He concludes the intro segment with some digs at George Lucas that I'm sure were hilarious right after "The Phantom Menace" came out, and a Pink Floyd-ish graphic takes us to the actual show.
Either nineties humor has aged really, really badly, or this intro was just never that funny to begin with.
Well, the comedy does pick up with the story proper's intro voiceover. The earnest, anxious musical background and super-serious philosophical tone of voice being what really sells it:
“My friend Jack says the universe is infinite. He says you can travel forever and never reach the edge. I say the edge is where you find it.”
It's a joke that makes sure you're actually paying attention. I dig it.
Our next gag is significantly more visual in nature. A dim-looking diner chef is listening to a sportsball radio cast as he works on tonight's dinner items. He's dismayed when the sportsball dissolves into static, and then gormlessly confused when the static gives way to horrifying alien gibbering and growls. When the unearthly sounds are joined by the radio sparking and flashing bright green, the chef does what any reasonable person would do and whacks it with his spatula.
Okay, this retroactively makes part of the Star Wars sniping a bit funnier. One of the things Ben Stiller said in the intro is that by dint of his vast fortune, he's been able to afford CGI effects that put Lucas' best efforts of the time to shame. And, I mean, it's funny because it's true. :V
Next comes a somewhat inappropriately timed intro. It's definitely retro, looking and sounding more like the intro to a late seventies or early eighties TV show than a late nineties one. Turns out I did have the names backward. Jack Austin, played by Jack Black, is the astronaut who gains hyperintelligence and nigh-infinite knowledge after being exposed to cosmic radiation. Heat Vision is the talking motorcycle, voiced by Owen Wilson, who is apparently animated by the consciousness of Jack's NEET roommate. I imagine his name was something other than Heat Vision before he got turned into a motorcycle, but I've already been wrong once in this review. Anyway, Heat Vision and Jack are on the run from someone, or looking for something, or maybe both ("they flee for their lives, but are blocked at every turn...by adventure!"). Black's giddy overacting is the highlight of this intro sequence, which isn't surprising when one considers that his giddy overacting is the highlight of almost everything he's ever been in.
It ends with Jack staring right into the camera, with a dramatic lens flare, and informing us that knowledge is power, for real. Meh, not the best of this show's garbled lines, but the delivery helps.
In media res opening. Jack is riding Heat Vision down a dark nighttime highway through the desert, bantering about their old days as a pair of normal humans and the embarrassing nonsense they used to get up to. Talking and driving is difficult though, because apparently Heat Vision can't speak without strobing his headlights in time to the syllables, which doesn't make for great road visibility in these conditions. Also, Jack is hungry and Heat Vision is running out of fuel, so they need to stop at the next gas station ahead anyway. Naturally, it's the same gas station where a diner chef just lost a fight with a radio.
Cut back to the roadside diner in question. A frazzled chef marches stiffly out into the front to tell the cashier/waitress lady that humanity is a disease that must be cleansed from this planet. It's considerate of him to keep her updated on these things, I'll give him that. He also corrects her when she tries to adress him as Frank; henceforth, the ape-woman with her primitive need for verbal totems will adress him as "Paragon," though "Master" will also do.
She's slow enough on the uptake to make Paragon frustrated, resulting him in lowering his shades and disintegrating the "worthless monkey whore" via eye contact.
Those must be some really good shades.
She backs into the jukebox, accidentally putting on Semi-Charmed Life before being murdered. Just in case things were getting too heavy.
I think the whole "possessed by malevolent aliens via radio signals" thing is from a then-recent horror movie or something? I know I saw that in some other piece of media around that time.
So, Heat Vision and Jack arrive at the station. Heat Vision stays outside to await gasing while Jack goes in to see if he can find anyone to pay for gas and hopefully food. Inside, he finds only darkness, Third Eye Blind songs, and "Kneel Before Paragon" written on the wall in blood. It's only tomato blood, as Jack calls it, but still, fairly serious. More serious still is the pile of carbon ash he finds on the floor next to a dropped pen and waiters' notepad.
It looks like their flight for their lives is being blocked by adventure once again!
Heat Vision rolls into the diner and theoretically watches Jack's back while the latter enters the kitchen. The spatula has been melted and fused into the radio set, which is still trembling and steaming. Also, a state trooper comes in the back door and holds Jack at gunpoint.
It's a lady sheriff, and there's a very weird joke involving failed sexual harassment that reflects more poorly on Jack than I think the writers intended, but which is still pretty dang funny in isolation:
Jack: You shouldn't point those things at people, they're dangerous.
Cop: Only if I pull the trigger.
Jack: I wasn't talking about the gun.
Cop: Neither was I.
Jack: *silly Jack Black confused face*
It feels like they had a good idea for a funny exchange, but shoehorned it in where it didn't quite fit.
Next thing we know, Jack is being locked in jail as a suspect in whatever the fuck happened to the gas station crew. He doesn't help his case by refusing to share his name. Or by panicking when she threatens to call his employers at NASA. He panics at the mention of that prospect, and babbles fearfully about how she could have known he was ex-NASA. She points out that he's still wearing the uniform.
You know Jack, if you're cagey enough about your identity that you won't give out your name, it might have been a good idea to get a different jacket at some point. I know, that's part of the joke, but between one thing and another I'm really starting to doubt this whole "mutant superintelligence" side of the show's premise, comedy or no.
...ah. Okay, there's an explanation for this, actually. When he repeats his backstory for the (understandably sceptical) officer, he insinuates that his hyperintelligence comes and goes with exposure to sunlight. So, while the sun is overhead he's a supergenius, but at night he's just a Jack Black character. Okay, that works. And also allows for some much more interesting episode plots, I think. Definitely a good conceptual decision.
Jack's metaphor for how this works, involving the cookie dough of the human brain being baked and expanded by the heat of the sun, is nonsense. But it also proves his point. It's nighttime right now, so of course his explanations are going to be stupid, come back in the morning if you want something that makes sense!
Anyway, since his return to Earth, Jack has been hunted by NASA agents who want to dissect his brain and learn how to safely replicate the cookie dough treatment. Well, one NASA agent in particular. A very dangerous one. The actor Ron Silver.
Not a character played by Ron Silver. Ron Silver. He's an actor and radio show host, but a lesser known fact is that he's also a NASA black ops thug.
...considering Silver's political trajectory in the years following this pilot, this is an oddly prescient writing/casting choice.
That said, this is another thing that might have been funnier if I was watching in 1999 and also happened to be tuned in to whatever celebrity gossip people were circulating at the time. Also, the whole "(actor), therefore (joke)" thing is another late nineties/early aughts stock gag that people got tired of pretty quickly after that era.
Well, if there was any chance of the cop believing Jack's story, the Ron Silver part nixes it. Fortunately, while Jack comically rages and thrashes around in his cell, she gets a call about another incident involving a perp calling themselves "Paragon" taking place along the highway. It happened just now, while Jack was in custody, so she concludes that he's guilty of nothing more than taking some really weird drugs and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She heads out to investigate the new scene, and tells Jack he'll probably just get some minor drug charges, but that he'd better not try any funny business until then because her guard dog Garry is watching, and he only rarely gets fed.
Poor hungry Garry.
Well, she's not calling NASA, and he's alone in the station now, so even if the motorcycle can't break Jack out before then he just needs to wait for dawn and then be able to outthink the bars and the terrifying guard beast with ease.
Cut to the next crime scene, at a roadside motel. Six missing prostitutes, and a large quantity of ash spread out all over the floor in the same room that has "kneel before paragon" written across the mirror in their lipstick. Medical analysis of the ash reveals it to be flash-dehydrated human tissue, but that's impossible; that kind of technology that can do that to a person only exists in comic books and rap music. As the sheriff and her medical forensicist with interesting ideas about rap music's subject matter mull over the findings, Ron Silver arrives at the scene. He even has a badge identifying him as such.
Silver pretends to be interested in the case, but then very unnaturally segues the conversation to asking about a man named Jack Austin who he believes may be in the area. Why did he even pretend to be interested in the disintegrations in the first place, then? Not sure. Also, when the sheriff asks him why he's looking for Jack, Silver starts to tell the truth before hastily inventing an excuse that makes him look EVEN SHADIER than the reality.
"He's an escaped test subject...erm...we were testing the effects of, uh, zero gravity. On the mentally ill."
Even without having been warned about this beforehand, she's a bit less likely to help this person find Jack now.
Back at the station, dawn casts its light between the bars of Jack's cell. Prompting a reprise of the intro footage of him being zapped by space radiation amid sick techno-riffs. When the transformation sequence is over, Jack can instantly determine that...um...I'm not sure how this is an extension of hyper-intelligence, per se, but somehow he can now turn a little plastic clasp from his uniform into a dog whistle and play perfectly timed and tuned notes on it that let him remotely control Garry the dog's motor functions and force him to bring him the key that the sheriff stupidly left sitting out in the open.
Obviously, I wasn't expecting Jack's "super intelligent" feats to ever make sense, but this is hard for me to parse even in light of that. Which, well. That DOES make it funnier, in a really weird way. I guess.
He leaves the dog stuck in an infinite tail-chasing loop before hopping aboard the waiting Heat Vision and speeding away to freedom on the open road. Not long afterward, the sheriff returns, apparently having been charmed back into compliance with Silver's requests by his endless string of dad jokes. The charm wears off pretty quickly once they reach the station and find Jack's cell empty, though. Especially when a frustrated Silver throws a heavy wooden table across the room in a fit of rage, and then lifts the sheriff off the floor by the throat, one-handed, before doing the same with her.
Looks like Ron Silver might have also benefitted from some space mutations or the like, and was lucky enough to be given a new job instead of dissected for them.
He's also either bulletproof, or makes a convincing performance of being so that she's inclined to believe after experiencing the superstrength. When he hears the safety come off her gun as she aims it at him, he delivers his threat to tear her lungs out through her nostrils if he feels so much as a single bullet hit him with such understated confidence and menace that it's ACTUALLY kind of scary. Even with the silly context and the ridiculous cowboy-lite guitar leitmotif the show is giving him. If he's bluffing, it's a successful bluff; she lets him stomp out of the station again without shooting, and doesn't dare even stand up again until he's gone.
Back to Jack and Heat Vision, who have returned to the gas station to steal some food and fuel since the owners clearly don't need it anymore. As Heat Vision siphons up gasoline while making orgasm noises, Jack stands inside the diner, under the sunlight of an open window, and calculates some kind of thing.
From the eye-illustration and some of the words he's mumbling, it seems like he's trying to reverse engineer the human disintegration process. And has somehow deduced that the effect is catalyzed by eye contact with something. Because lol superintelligence I guess.
Speaking of the owners, and of human disintegration, Heat Vision finishes fueling up and starts rolling back toward the diner when the former chef now known as Paragon looms out of nowhere and blocks his path.
Does the disintegration work on a living motorcycle that doesn't have eyes? Actually, what does Heat Vision even use to see with anyway? Like, is there a certain part of the motorcycle that randomly acts as his eyes? If so, maybe Paragon can still get him if he knows where to stare at. Although...can you dehydrate a motorcycle, regardless of whether...eh, well, even if you can't Paragon could always just start attacking him with a sledgehammer or something, so there's still a danger.
Well, he does try. And, it seems like however Heat Vision works, the dehydrator-eyes don't impede it. The attempt gives Heat Vision the time he needs to alert Jack to the situation. Jack's superintelligence skips a beat here, causing him to run right up to the baddy even though he's already (somehow) figured out that there's someone he should avoid looking at on the loose. Fortunately, it turns out that being disintegrated takes a minute or so, and while Paragon has his eye rays trained on someone for that duration he's kind of a sitting duck. It's Heat Vision's moment to shine!
Being charged by a speeding motorcycle doesn't hurt Paragon nearly as much as it would most people, but it disorients him for a minute while the sheriff drives her cruiser up to the site. Paragon might talk a big game about how lowly and inferior humans are, but he seems to be aware that he's an ambush predator who can only really prey on lone victims, and this is just too much heat all at once. He flees.
How did the cop lady know to come back here, though? She didn't have any reason to think they'd come back this way, did she?
Ah well.
With Paragon still on the loose, and the sheriff informing Jack that Ron Silver is in the area, they need to lay low and rest somewhere before deciding what to do next. Fortunately, the sheriff (what is even her name? I don't think she's been named. I'll call her Batsheba, whatever) has access to her grandparents' house for the time being, and that's a good place to stash a couple people and a talking motorcycle. As Jack and Batsheba get some much needed rest in the house, Heat Vision entertains Batsheba's nieces and nephews in the yard.
Watching this frolicking prompts Batsheba to ask what the hell Heat Vision even is. She initially assumes that Jack built him during a frenzy of sunlight-fuelled supergenius creativity, but the truth is far more tragic than that. When Ron Silver and his NASA masters were holding Jack prisoner in preparation for the dissecting, Jack managed to slip his cell and get access to a phone...which he used to call his NEET roommate Doug, for some reason. Doug did have a motorcycle, though, and he was brave enough to take it over to the base to try and be Jack's getaway ride during the escape. Unfortunately, he was shot during the getaway. Fortunately(?), he was shot with some weird experimental energy weapon instead of just a normal gun. A weapon that I guess is powered by Amestrian alchemy or something, because it caused Doug's body to vanish without a trace while infusing his soul into the motorcycle that it had just been sitting on.
On that day, Doug died, and Heat Vision was born. How he ended up changing his name to "Heat Vision" is left totally unexplained.
Batsheba comments that Jack seems more unhappy with this transformation than Heat Vision himself does. Jack responds to this with the profound statement that "if fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle," delivered with the appropriate sighing and intense space-staring for such a melancholy pronouncement.
The music goes soft and emotional as Batsheba asks Jack if the same applies to him. The answer? No. No, because unlike Heat Vision, Jack is not a motorcycle.
Still, she says, even if he isn't a motorcycle, doesn't he ever get tired of spinning his wheels all day, every day? Doesn't he ever feel the need to stop for gas, even if there's no safe garage for him in this world? He does, sometimes, but he fears to. Because - he explains, with tears forming in his eyes - the gasoline is always consumed when he stops to fuel himself with it; there's a spark, a flame, and he moves on forward while the gas is consumed.
Then they make out.
It's definitely one of the funniest scenes thus far. The music and acting/direction are just spot on.
The next morning, Batsheba wakes up to find Jack already fully awake and working on a solution to their little Paragon problem while Heatvision watches Dr. Who. I'm not sure how he managed to find that, given that this is America in the pre-streaming days, but I guess her grandparents had some Who on VHS or something. Also, since the 2001 relaunch with Eccleston hasn't happened yet, it's Classic Who. I think it might actually be Genesis of the Daleks, specifically. Heat Vision has good taste in Who.
This is an important detail that merits the amount of words I've devoted to it.
Anyway, Jack was up with the sun, and since its rays started juicing him up again he's put together a weapon that he's pretty sure will work on Paragon. Erm...did they ever try using NORMAL weapons on Paragon? He recovered pretty quickly from being charged by the motorbike, but they have yet to try, like, bullets. He ran away when he saw the cop car approaching, so he himself seems to think that human weapons pose a threat to him, right? Well, whatever, Jack has his own approach. He's grabbed himself a radio box similar to the one that Paragon first possessed his host with, and built a bunch of Back To The Future-ish garbagepunk attachments to it.
Because of technobabble, Paragon's hold on his human host becomes tenuous when he's using his gaze attack. So, they've got to knock his shades off (or bait him into doing it of his own volition) and then hit him with the spatula that Jack has hooked up to the machine. This should reverse the process that he used to take over the chef, scattering the alien signal that he's using to remotely control the poor man and hopefully causing some feedback damage to the actual entity that's been sending the signal.
It's not clear if the chef will survive this process either, but at least there's a chance, which is better than what he'd have if they resorted to bullets or explosives. So sure, that's a good enough reason to try Jack's way first.
Of course, they have to find Paragon first. Ideally while also avoiding Ron Silver. You know, I feel like this story would be a little stronger if Jack and/or Heat Vision were invested in dealing with Paragon. As it is, you'd think the knowledge that Silver is so close on their tail would make them want to wish the locals good luck in dealing with the monster of the week and GTFO.
During their initial exchange of words before the latter got frustrated and started eye-blasting, Heat Vision heard Paragon mumble something about looking for "sunken treasure" or something like that. Batsheba figures out that he may have been talking about the Sunken Pleasure, a nearby strip joint. This alien seems to strongly prefer sex workers as prey, for whatever reason.
Cut to the Sunken Pleasure, where Paragon is sizing up some dancers. But not lustfully. More like a shopper at a grocery store.
If there ISN'T a lustful component to this though, then seriously, why sex workers? Is Paragon just too lazy to buck the conventions or something?
He disintegrates some strippers, and then disintegrates some bouncers and patrons who try to stop him from disintegrating the strippers.
...actually, while attacking one dancer, he says "I'll teach you inferior females to reject paragon." So, either Paragon is channelling some latent misogyny from his host, or this actually is an alien incel taking out his rage on women who probably aren't even made of the same base elements as the ones who went with Space Chad instead of him. In the second case, man, what a loser.
Before Paragon can complete his rampage, Heat Vision kool-aids through the wall with Jack on his back. And also Batsheba following a little bit after them on foot, but that's less dramatic. Cue amusingly lame action comedy sequence. As the fight ramps up and Batsheba struggles to get the radio contraption set up, Ron Silver (naturally) finds his way to the scene.
Batsheba is forced to clonk him on the head with the device in order to stop him from shooting Jack, which has the unfortunate side effect of breaking said device. While she and Heat Vision struggle to keep Silver from getting back to his feet, Jack has a lucky break when a stripper pole is knocked over and gets lodged in a cassette player. With the help of an improvised blindfold he grabbed off of a chagrinned stripper's chest, he baits Paragon into using the gaze attack on him, resists it, and then gets him to touch the pole while he's got the zappy-eyes active.
On the down side, it appears that the chef was a lost case. His body is totally vaporized when the alien controller is removed from him (though he also shrugged off some bullets before this happens, so I guess that wouldn't have worked after all. Heh). The alien...signal? ghost? whatever part of "Paragon" was actually in the possessed victim...is siphoned up through the pole and conducted through the machine before being saved on cassette. He's imprisoned inside the cassette tape now. Or...whatever radio code he uses to remotely control people is imprisoned in there. However he works.
The DJ takes out the tape and hands it to the guy who seems to know what he's doing for proper disposal. I'm pretty sure the DJ is Ben Stiller with glasses and fake facial hair.
I checked the credits, and yeah, it's him again.
Ron Silver - disoriented from multiple motorcycle impacts - is left handcuffed while Heat Vision, Jack, and Batsheba leave the building. Heat Vision gets some photos taken with a bunch of strippers. Jack starts to tell Batsheba how to safely dispose of the cassette tape, but then the sun sets and he forgets what he's trying to explain midsentence.
Oh well, she'll figure it out surely.
There's some more faux-emotional and faux-philosophical dialogue, albeit not quite as funny as the last round of such. Jack and Batsheba have their goodbye kiss. Then, it's back on the road for the dynamic duo.
Batsheba heads back into the club to deal with Silver, only to find him gone, with the handcuffs torn apart from the inside. Superstrength is annoying to deal with.
Our parting shots are of Jack riding Heat Vision away along the highway, with another voiceover of Heat Vision saying profound-sounding nonsense about the universe and the shape of the earth and suchlike. And of Ron Silver, pursuing them in a car while assuring his masters at NASA that he'll have that brain soon, don't worry.
My description of the last couple scenes probably feels rushed, but there's just not much for me to say. The fight scene has some decent gags, but they're almost all visual and focused on Jack Black doing his usual brand of physical comedy, so I can't really put them to text. Anyway, that's the pilot to a series that never was.
Frankly, I think that it benefits from never having gotten picked up. It IS decent, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it would be able to keep that up for long. Some of the jokes were starting to get repetitive even by the end of this pilot, and I feel like the premise of the show would run itself dry of good ideas in six episodes tops. I also feel like the amateurishness (that some big name actors happen to be involved in) is a big part of the charm, and that getting an actual budget would remove a lot of what makes it work.
The way that this pilot felt the need to introduce the recurring antagonist but then also have him split the time with a monster of the week (and failed to really tie the two together into a cohesive story, so much as just have them both happen passed each other at the same time) is another source of misgivings. Rushing through conceptual material like that tends to precede burnout, and if they were already doing that in the pilot, well.
An enjoyable little indie scifi comedy film project. Maybe I'm being overly cynical in my predictions of what would have happened if it continued, but in any case it's a fine one-off.
