BEFORE: Jeff Bridges carries over from "Arlington Road", and I've set the Wayback Machine for 1984 tonight. I was busy being a 15 year old that summer, and I never got around to watching this one. But I never would have appreciated it at the time, I'm thinking.
THE PLOT: A gangster hires an ex-football player to find his girlfriend. When he finds her, they fall in love, and the twists start to appear.
AFTER: Yeah, as a teen this would not have been my cup of tea. Hell, I'm not even sure it's my cup of tea now that I'm an adult. It's just a basic romance film, the scenery's kind of nice, since most of it is set on the Yucatan peninsula, and also the resort island of Cozumel in Mexico. I was there as part of a honeymoon cruise, I remember riding in a bumpy jeep driven by another couple to a beach where we ate fish tacos. The locals all drove used Volkswagens, because the replacement parts were so easy to get. The scenery there is quite nice, and I think that's the only time I've been to Mexico - most years I just get really close by visiting San Diego.
All I really knew about this film before tonight was the theme song, which was a blockbuster hit for Phil Collins back in 1984. Those were the days when you could just shoot the singer in front of a basic microphone on a sparse set, throw in a bunch of clips from the movie the song appeared in, and call it a day. In this case, I bet they took all the key moments from the film and put them in the video, creating a stronger narrative than the film itself has.
The plot concerns a football player cut from the L.A. Outlaws, who takes a job tracking down a friend's girlfriend, who coincidentally is the daughter of the football team's owner. He finds her pretty quickly, because the search, consisting of him showing her picture to everyone in Cozumel, isn't very cinematic. But when he falls for her and they make love on beaches and ancient ruins, ah, that's a different story.
There are hints of blackmail, betting scandals (Against All "Odds", I see what you did there...), and some kind of shady land deal, but nothing concrete really came together in the end, if you ask me. Two people from different worlds have a romance in a vacation paradise, and then eventually the real world intrudes, making it difficult for them to continue their relationship.
It turns out this is really a remake of the 1947 film "Out of the Past", with a number of plot details changed. That film starred Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, and was also about a man hired to find another man's girlfriend, who'd run off to Acapulco with $40,000. The film's poster also seems to be a rip-off of the famous beach scene in "From Here to Eternity", so nearly everything here feels borrowed or lifted from someplace else - turns out you really can't re-create the film noir style in sunny Mexico in 1984.
Also starring Rachel Ward, James Woods (last seen in "Cat's Eye"), Alex Karras, Dorian Harewood (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Saul Rubinek (last seen in "Dick"), Swoosie Kurtz (last seen in "Slap Shot"), Richard Widmark (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Jane Greer, plus Kid Creole and the Coconuts, and "Tundra the Wonder Dog".
RATING: 3 out of 10 tackling dummies
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