MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*
THE SENDER is a decent time-killer from the last few years of PM Entertainment, before the company was sold to another business entity. Like many PM productions, it attempts to cover big plot-holes with lots of gunfights, car chases and martial battles, but it does so efficiently enough.
Thirty years before the main story, an Air Force pilot named Jack Grayson disappears after his encounter with a UFO. The main tale then begins as Jack's son Dallas Grayson (Michael Madsen) visits an air base where his father's old plane is hangared, and immediately butts heads with an asshole officer, Rosewater (R. Lee Ermey). Following an action scene that has little relevance save to demonstrate Grayson's fighting-skills, he next checks out a local hospital, where he discharges his cancer-afflicted little girl Lisa.
Some dialogue establishes that Lisa has an imaginary friend named Angel. Yet that night the viewer learns the truth: Angel (Shelli Lether) is a sexy blonde alien who visits Lisa in her bed and administers energy-treatments to save the little girl from her disease. These scenes carry a sort of emotional resonance foreign to most bang-bang crash-crash PM offerings in that, since Lisa's mother died a while back, Angel can easily be seen as a magical mother-surrogate for Lisa.
Shortly after the lady ET departs, or seems to, Rosewater and other soldier-goons invade Grayson's house, setting it on fire after abducting Lisa and fatally shooting Grayson. However, for whatever reason Angel's still hovering close enough to come back and use her powers to save the hero's life. From then on, the armed forces guy and the alien form an unlikely duo as they seek to liberate Lisa from Rosewater's boss Lockwood. This evil scientist, portrayed by that block of wood known as Steven Williams, has learned (the film never says how) why the aliens have been watching Lisa. The tyke possesses unique genetic traits that make her capable of becoming a "Sender," someone who can magically open gateways between worlds. Angel was sent to keep tabs on Lisa, though since she is by definition a good alien, she never explicitly says that she wants to abduct Lisa in order to make her into a wormhole-engineer for Angel's people. One would think the writers would have given their villains some bwaa-ha-ha moment where they explain how they plan to profit from suborning Lisa's talent. But no, for the writers, it's good enough to say that Lockwood runs either Area 51 itself or a near relation, and that's enough to prove he's evil.
The action-scenes are plentiful if unremarkable, leavened slightly by Angel's ability to perform an occasional energy-stunt. Madsen at this point in his career was beginning to phone in some of his performances, and as a result Grayson always seems distanced from the goings-on, even when he's supposedly on fire to recover his beloved daughter. This also holds true for Angel's eleventh-hour revelation that Grayson's father Jack is still alive. Why did the aliens keep him away from his family for thirty years, and why does Jack seem to be OK with it? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with his sharing his granddaughter's genetic propensities, since the writers go out of their way to assert that the wormhole-power only manifests in females. Anyway, once the evil Area 51 1/2 has been destroyed, Angel takes her tearful leave from Lisa. Then Grayson, his father and his daughter all plan to go get ice cream, as if there wasn't any possibility that they'd ever again be menaced by acquisitive government agencies. But if one can turn off any desire for verisimilitude in one's brain, THE SENDER manages to be marginally enjoyable.
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