The first time I saw Ben Affleck was in the Matt Damon-Robin Williams starrer, Good Will Hunting. Even then, I had some sort of premonition that he will be a huge star. He has that mesmerizing screen persona and definitely the looks. It was the same reaction I had when I first saw Keanu Reeves in the Pointbreak, before he became The Keanu Reeves that he is today.
True enough, Affleck and buddy Matt Damon went on to snag the Oscar for Best Screenplay. For a while, Affleck became the other half of Hollywood’s newest "Golden Boys."
For an actor who got his biggest break by winning the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, you would expect Affleck to go on and make well-made, intelligent and ground-breaking films.
Alas, his succeeding films were a string of no-brainers: Armageddon, Daredevil, Forces of Nature, Gigli, Jersey Girl, to name some. Despite these, I still remain a huge Ben Affleck fan (martyr?).
An exception among Ben Affleck’s so-so films is Changing Lanes. Yes, it is an action movie (where Affleck co-starred with Samuel Jackson).
But it is an action movie with much, much more. That’s what made the movie surprisingly delightful. Nothing delights a moviegoer (and a huge fan at that!) more than seeing his expectations met, and even surpassed.
Underneath the action sequences (not really hard-action since the "action" only involves, at most, car crashes and verbal tussles) are lessons on integrity and doing the right thing. Watching Changing Lanes is like reading Stephen Covey between the book jacket of a Tom Clancy best-seller.
The movie has an inauspicious and simple plot. Two men (Affleck, as a hotshot lawyer and Jackson as a marginalized and struggling New Yorker) are driving in the crazy streets of New York. Affleck is hurrying on his way to work. To overtake the gridlock and the mass of cars ahead of him, Affleck leaves his lane and swerves to the other lane, forcefully hitting Jackson’s car and smashing it to a side rail. The car is a total wreck. The pompous lawyer, to avoid further delay, merely promises that an insurance guy will look into the accident. He quickly dispatches himself, inadvertently leaving behind an attache case of vital documents for his boss. The documents get into Jackson’s hands. It is at this point when the tale of hatred, revenge, of putting one over the other (lamangan) starts. Jackson wants to be compensated for the wrecked car. He also seeks recompense for arriving late (for the nth time!) at a very crucial family case which the judge has now decided against him, consequently alienating him from his beloved wife and children. Affleck, upon the other hand, just wants the extremely important documents back.
All these troubles were prompted by a very simple and innocuous act of swerving to a lane and trying to overtake other motorists. (A very ubiquitous occurrence in our thoroughfares.)
The movie’s action scenes merely serve as a backdrop to the moral it is driving at: no matter who you are, what you have, or whatever your status in life, integrity and doing the right thing are of utmost importance. Even a very simple act of staying at your intended lane in the street tells a lot about you.
The movie’s catchphrase says it all: "One wrong turn deserves another." Basically, this is just a permutation of the maxims "What you sow is what you reap" and "Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you." It is the sum total of all the tips found in most self-help books integrity diagrams.
It is quite amusing to find all these morals in an action movie. It seems like a primer for good driving or a courtesy-on-the-road campaign. Yet the movie is for me the smartest Affleck has starred in for years. Now, if only all those kamikaze drivers in our major thoroughfares could watch this movie and learn a thing or two from it!