Taglines: Hang on for the ride of your life!
8 Seconds movie storyline. While growing up in Oklahoma, young Lane Frost (Cameron Finley) learns the tricks of the bull riding trade at the hand of his father, Clyde (James Rebhorn), an accomplished rodeo bronco rider himself. As he enters his teenage and early adult years, Lane (Luke Perry) travels the western rodeo circuit with his best friends Tuff Hedeman (Stephen Baldwin) and Cody Lambert (Red Mitchell). He meets and falls in love with a young barrel racer, Kellie Kyle, and they eventually marry in 1984.
As Lane’s legend and fame increase, so does the amount of pressure he puts on himself, to be what everyone wants him to be, and he wants to show that he is as good as they say he is. His ascent to the world championship is marred by a cheating incident, questions about Kellie’s devotion, and a near broken neck. The film also follows him through the true life series between himself and Red Rock, a bull that no cowboy had ever been able to stay on for 8 seconds. It cuts the series down to three rides. In 1989, he is the second-to-last rider at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.
8 Seconds is a 1994 American biographical drama film directed by John G. Avildsen. Its title refers to the length of time a bull rider is required to stay on for a ride to be scored. It stars Luke Perry as American rodeo legend Lane Frost and focuses on his life and career as a bull riding champion. It also features Stephen Baldwin as Tuff Hedeman, and Red Mitchell as Cody Lambert. Notably, there is an early appearance by Renée Zellweger.
Film Review for 8 Seconds
John G. Avildsen’s film “8 Seconds” could spawn a boom in rodeo bull riding the way the movie “Urban Cowboy” did in mechanical bull riding 14 years ago, except for one crucial fact. The sport it depicts is just too dangerous. As the film makes graphically clear, trying to stay atop a snorting, bucking 2,000-pound bull for eight seconds while holding a mount with only one hand is no idle party game.
The movie’s viscerally gripping scenes of competitive bull riding take the camera into the thundering heart of the action, where maintaining a precarious perch is only one challenge. Once a rider is thrown, he faces the immediate threat of being trampled or gored. And the film has scenes of both.
The true story of Lane Frost, the world champion bull rider who died in the ring in 1989 at the peak of his career, “8 Seconds” was directed by Mr. Avildsen with the same narrative exuberance he brought to “Rocky” and “The Karate Kid.” The movie has the streamlined energy and emotional directness of a modern country-rock ballad. Bill Conti’s aggressively brassy soundtrack is augmented by an album’s worth of tough and tender country songs performed by John Anderson, Brooks and Dunn, Reba McEntire and others that enhance the rural atmosphere.
Not the least of the movie’s strengths is a screenplay by Monte Merrick, which captures the clipped vernacular of country people who live close to the land and are not given to deep psychological self-scrutiny. The movie’s happiest surprise is the strong, persuasive portrayal of Lane by the television heartthrob Luke Perry. The wiry young actor, who adopted a convincing Southwestern twang for the part, gives what might be called a defensive performance in its shunning of sentimentality and pretty-boy poses.
In Mr. Perry’s hands, Lane emerges as an obsessively competitive, insecure and emotionally underdeveloped farm boy driven by a desperate need to please his undemonstrative father (James Rebhorn). Lane is so sensitive to his father’s lack of praise that he goes out of his way to encourage younger boys with rodeo dreams. And this generosity of spirit, the film suggests, is his nicest quality.
A very straightforward biography, “8 Seconds” occasionally assumes the tone of a cinematic ballad like “Sweet Dreams,” the movie biography of Patsy Cline. The story begins in 1968 with scenes of young Lane (Cameron Finley) competing in children’s rodeos, then quickly jumps to the 1980’s. With his pals, the super-macho Tuff Hedeman (Stephen Baldwin) and Cody Lambert (Red Mitchell), who writes cowboy poetry in his spare time, Lane is part of a threesome traveling the rodeo circuit, sharing cheap motel rooms and living on burgers.
The rowdy, hard-drinking Tuff is both a mentor and a rival to the puritanical Lane. After Lane suffers an excruciating groin injury, it is Tuff who urges him to “cowboy up” and goads him to get back on a bull before he has fully recovered. The film’s portrayal of their friendship, which deepens and changes over several years, strikes its deepest emotional chord, as Tuff metamorphoses from a friendly bully into an unabashed admirer. And Mr. Baldwin’s depiction of Tuff’s emotional meltdown nearly steals the film.
Lane’s life becomes complicated when he falls in love with Kellie Kyle (Cynthia Geary), a champion horse rider who gives up her career to marry him. Ms. Geary imbues the role with just the right mixture of true grit and naivete. And the screenplay conveys the inevitable problems that afflict the marriage with a minimum of words. Self-centered and career-driven, Lane is on the road much of the time, and the couple’s attempts at long-distance communication turn into awkward games of telephone answering-machine tag.
As Lane becomes a star, his success goes to his head and magnifies his obsessiveness. The couple’s awkward, if heartfelt dialogues never let us forget the youth and innocence of two people who have only an elementary idea of how to verbalize their feelings. In the most pathetic scene, Lane, responding to Kellie’s desire for a home, presents her with a garishly painted mobile home that is his idea of the perfect love nest and her worst nightmare of a domestic haven. After a few stumbling protests, she accepts it.
In such scenes it would be easy for “8 Seconds” to patronize its characters. But one pleasure of the movie is the way it takes the rodeo world on its own terms. Since “8 Seconds” is both a Hollywood movie and an elegy for a real-life hero, it, of course, ennobles that world and softens its harsher edges. And in its final minutes, it comes perilously close to turning to mush. But when it’s over, it leaves you feeling more invigorated than played upon.
8 Seconds (1994)
Directed by: John G. Avildsen
Starring: Luke Perry, Stephen Baldwin, James Rebhorn, Carrie Snodgress, Ronnie Claire Edwards, Cynthia Geary, Dustin Mayfield, Joe Stevens, Gabriel Folse
Screenplay by: Monte Merrick
Production Design by: William J. Cassidy
Cinematography by: Victor Hammer
Film Editing by: J. Douglas Seelig
Costume Design by: Deena Appel
Set Decoration by: Jenny C. Patrick
Art Direction by: John Frick
Music by: Bill Conti
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language.
Distributed by: New Line Cinema
Release Date: February 25, 1994
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