BEFORE: Not to be confused with the Dennis Quaid baseball movie of the same name, which I watched about 3 months ago... I'm wrapping up a Clint Eastwood triple feature tonight. I guess I screwed up - it's Friday the 13th, and I'm doing nothing to mark the occasion - I maybe should have thought of serial killers, which would have led me to program "Manhunter" tonight. Oh, well.
THE PLOT: A veteran cop gets stuck with a rookie partner to chase down a German criminal.
AFTER: This one has "Grand Theft Auto" written all over it - auto theft is the main crime committed in the film - the thieves rob multiple luxury cars at a time, using a car carrier, and have multiple chop-shop locations around the city of L.A.
Clint Eastwood plays the grizzled cop - surprise, he doesn't play by the rules - who's spent months setting up the bust of the car theft ring, only to have the bust turn into a disaster. So he navigates through the L.A. underworld to find his informants, and work his way up the chain to get better intel. He's saddled with a new partner, played by Charlie Sheen (last seen in "Wall Street").
The film starts out with Eastwood's Nick Pulovski as the main character, but over the course of the movie, Sheen's character, Ackerman, takes on a more prominent role - I suppose he is the title character, after all. When Pulovksi is kidnapped, by the somehow-German (?) thieves, played by Raul Julia and Sonia Braga (I'm fairly sure neither is actually German), Ackerman has to apply all the lessons he's learned form Pulovski, and make up some new rules of his own, to track them down.
I think this one had some inventive things, it sort of rose above the average buddy-cop film for me. Plenty of action, and some cool stunts I haven't seen done before. Some are also reminiscent of "GTA 3", like driving a car out of a 2nd floor window, just as the building explodes... and any shoot-out at an airport is going to remind me of "GTA: Vice City".
Also starring Lara Flynn Boyle (last seen in "Mobsters") and Tom Skerritt.
RATING: 7 out of 10 cigars (I know, I'm going to get flack for rating this higher than "Dirty Harry"...bring it on)
No comments:
Post a Comment