Kiefer Sutherland is the straight-arrow young FBI man assigned to return him to Spokane, Wash., for trial.
What was Huey Walker's crime? When Spiro T. Agnew was on a whistle-stop train through the Pacific Northwest in 1968, Walker uncoupled his railroad car - so when the train pulled out, Agnew was left waiting at the station. This was a gag good enough to make Walker a hero of the counterculture at the time, but now his time has long since passed and he is just another sad drifter, moving along every time anyone begins to suspect his true identity.
Walker is finally betrayed to the FBI by an anonymous phone caller, and that's when John Buckner, the Sutherland character, is called into play. His job is to accompany the aging hippie as he goes back home to face the music. And, of course, the two men take the train. No points for correctly predicting that history will repeat itself.
"Flashback" seems to be settling down into a combination of two recent movies, one good, one bad: "Midnight Run," where Robert De Niro had to return Charles Grodin cross country, and "Rude Awakening," where two aging 1960s hippies were dumped into 1989. But then, just when the movie seems content to settle into its formula, the screenplay by David Loughery gets inventive, instead.
Walker, played on a perfect note of spaced-out wackiness by Hopper, begins to play psychological games with Buckner. He discovers the FBI man is only 26 years old and begins to taunt him about his conservative appearance and rigidly correct opinions. Before long Buckner has unwound enough to play a game of chess with his captive, and then Walker convinces him he has slipped a tab of acid into his mineral water.
The FBI man begins to trip out, and the old hippie shaves his beard, cuts his hair and changes places with him - so that when they arrive at an intermediate stop, it's Walker who presents himself as the agent and the zonked-out Buckner who looks like the radical. This is all lots of fun, as Walker and Buckner develop an edgy back-and-forth rivalry, but it's also all predicted in the trailer. In fact, on the basis of the trailer, you'd predict that the movie would continue as a series of gags involving mistaken identity.
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