Heart and Souls (1993) VHS Movie Review

Heart and Souls was released in theaters on August 13th, 1993 on a budget of $25,000,000 and had a gross of $16,581,714.

Directed by Ron Underwood, the same guy who brought us Tremors, City Slickers, and Mighty Joe Young.

Produced by Sean Daniel, this guy is an excellent creative producer, his career spans four decades, was the youngest president of production at Universal Pictures. During his tenure, he shepherded such hits as Back to the Future, Animal House, Brazil, Sixteen Candles, The Blues Brothers and Field of Dreams.

As a producer, his films have grossed more than $2 billion worldwide. They include The Mummy franchise, Dazed, and Confused and Tombstone. He helped start Mythos in 2018, a production company that just signed a mega-deal with Amazon.

Screenplay by Brent Maddock and SS Wilson, these two make another appearance on our show, the first was for Wild Wild West.

Hearts and Souls Cast
Robert Downey Jr as Thomas Reilly (Iron Man)
Eric Lloyd as 7-year-old Thomas Reilly (Santa Clause trilogy)
Kyra Sedgwick as Julia (The Closer TV series)
Alfre Woodard as Penny Washington (12 Years a Slave, Captain America: Civil War)
Tom Sizemore as Milo Peck (Saving Private Ryan, True Romance)
Charles Grodin as Harrison Winslow (George Newton in Beethoven)
Elisabeth Shue as Anne (Adventures in Babysitting, Leaving Las Vegas)
David Paymer as Hal the Bus Driver (City Slickers and Mr. Saturday Night)

In 1959 We are introduced to 4 people:
Penny, a single mother, she regrets working the night shift and leaving her three children at home.
Harrison, a would-be singer, that suffers from stage fright.
Julia, a waitress that moved to the city to experience city life and to avoid getting married to her boyfriend John.
Milo, a small-time thief and tough guy that conned a young boy out of his grandfather’s stamps. He tried to steal them back got beat up by the guy who hired him.

They all ride the same bus that night and die because their bus driver Hal can’t keep his eyes off a sexy pair of legs. The 4 souls of Penny, Harrison, Julia, and Milo all enter Thomas Reilly while he is being born in the family car. Hal for some reason gets a pass and accends to heaven.

As the years pass Thomas is the only one you can see his ghost and they all form a deep bound. As the boy ages, he has problems because people think he’s weird. Thomas’s mother and father almost have him committed but the ghosts realize they are harming his life and make themselves invisible to Thomas. The abandonment causes young Thomas to avoid close relationships for the rest of his life, fearful that they, too, will leave him.

Twenty-seven years later we meet Thomas, now a ruthless foreclosure banker who refuses to open up to his devoted girlfriend Anne and lives on his car phone. Hal returns with his trolleybus. Because his irresponsibility ended four innocent lives, Hal has been condemned to convey spirits to the next life, and he has now come for his former passengers.

They reveal themselves to Thomas and he crashes his car. He wakes up in a hospital and he attempts to check himself into a psychiatric hospital, where a schizophrenic patient can see his ghost. This convinces Thomas that the spirits are real, but he is still angry with them for their abandonment and refuses to help them. The quartet convinces him by leaping in and out of his body during an important meeting and threatening further public humiliation until Thomas reluctantly agrees to help in order to finally be rid of them.

One by one the ghosts solve their unfinished business.
1. Milo steals back the stamps and gives them to the grown-up kid. However, after the burglary, a nervous Thomas encounters a police sergeant (who is ticketing his illegally parked car) and accidentally gets himself arrested, forcing Anne to bail him out.
2. Harrison uses Thomas’s body to sing the national anthem at a B.B. King concert. Anne is in the audience and gets mad at Thomas for skipping their date.
3. After which Thomas is arrested again by the same police sergeant, who Penny suddenly recognizes as her son. Thomas tells Billy the location of his long-lost sisters, and Billy is so overcome that he lets Thomas go with a warning after hitting his car.
4. Finally, Thomas and Julia write a letter to Julia’s boyfriend John in which she confesses her love for him, only to learn that John died several years before. At the same moment, the trolleybus returns to take Julia. Thomas protests that Julia’s business is still unresolved, but Julia realizes that her true business is Thomas, who is making the same mistake with Anne that she made with John. Thomas promises her that he will tell Anne his true feelings before it is too late, allowing Julia to depart.

Thomas invites Anne back to his apartment, where he tells her his fear of abandonment and his love for her. He gives her a heart-shaped keyring containing all his personal keys. Anne takes him back, then the two of them dance under the night sky were four new stars twinkle to show that Penny, Julia, Harrison, and Milo are finally at peace.

Come back next week when we review Now and Then from 1995 to continue our ladies month!

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