Saturday, November 25, 2017

On Location: Thunderstruck

It's not uncommon for professional athletes to make the transition into acting. Sometimes it turns into a prosperous second career and sometimes...you get movies like Thunderstruck. The 2012 film was legendary baller Kevin Durant's foray into movie stardom and featured the OKC Thunder in all their glory (kind of). So let's pop the top off this can of Pringles:


A fair amount of the movie was shot in Arkansas but since it takes place in Oklahoma City hey made sure to include some obvious local settings.  The most obvious, of course, is Chesapeake Energy Arena.  Plenty of game scenes were shot there:



The story is essentially your basic body-swap-without-a-body-swap story.  Young Brian is an Oklahoma high school student with dreams of being a basketball star but no actual talent.  After getting the opportunity to try to sink a basket from half court during a game, Brian screws it up monumentally and is consoled by KD.  And that's when this Friday gets freaky:


For no apparent reason they switch basketball ability.  Brian becomes incredible talented while Durant starts to play like a high school bench warmer.  As you can imagine, wacky hijinks ensue.  Instead of breaking down the plot (or "plot") let's take a quick look at the few Oklahoma filming locations they used, like this shot outside the Chesapeake Arena exterior:


Later in the film there's a nice establishing shot of downtown that shows crane work being done on the Devon Energy Center.   It was under construction from around 2009 to around 2012 with the cranes arriving around 2010 giving us a nice little time capsule moment for the movie.


Toward the end of the movie our hero Brian hastily heads over the bridge into the Bricktown area on his way to swap back b-ball powers with KD and you get a nice little look at the area:




Once he gets there it's time to de-magic the magic.  But who was the sinister fiend behind the curse this whole time?  It occurs to the guys that the switch first happened after the basketball bounced off Rumble the Mascot's head so they recreate the incident:


Yep, Rumble was apparently (perhaps unknowingly) the mastermind behind this entire voodoo dumpster fire.  At least the guys got their payback.  That monstrous, cheer mongering prairie dweller will think twice before he curses an NBA legend and some rando kid.

So after that, both of the guys win their respective games (spoiler warning, I guess) and we all learned some kind of valuable lesson...The End.  (Also, Jim Belushi was in this movie.)

 

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