Back before they made superhero movies all the time, some movies felt like 'comic books' even though they weren't based on existing properties and didn't feature any spandex clad muscleman pounding miscreants into the pavement. The setting might be the most comic book thing about this film: the cityscape is proudly and rampantly artificial. The back-lot sets for the various well-defined neighborhoods for the fictional unnamed city were covered with a gigantic tarp so they could film the lengthy night scenes during the day, a virtual necessity because of the young ages of many of the cast. Every piece of trash and dirty puddle of rain water looks choreographed and art directed, and all the background threaten to swallow up some of the less dynamic performers.
Another one of the ways to be a 'comic book' movie is to feature big big BIG performances. There's no room for subtlety here. This is supposed to be the ultimate teenager movie, and teenagers aren't usually subtle. Some of the actors really sell the unsubtle, archetypal nature of their characters. Actually, its many of the very small parts (unfortunately) that have strong, larger than life performances to match the larger than life nature of the film. Bill Paxton (same year he got killed by The Terminator) is the sarcastic bartender, more like the Sarcastic Bartender, who says hello with "Hey how's your hammer hanging?" Lynne Thigpen, immortal to those of a certain age as The Chief on Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego? but also the mysterious omniscient DJ who appears as just a pair of lips in Walter Hill's earlier classic The Warriors, plays a sassy bus driver.
The city only seems to have two real cops, and one of them is played by Richard Lawson, who was the professor's assistant in Poltergeist who didn't eat his own face. Voice acting legend EG Daly (Tommy Pickles, 999 other things) plays a rock groupie named Baby Doll and if you weren't already aware, then it might rub you the wrong way to learn that the lady that voiced Tommy Pickles is kinda hot (the less said about Bobby Hill the better). There's also a Doo-wop band featured that's chock full of black characters actors: the other Agent Johnson from Die Hard Grand L. Bush, The Meteor Man himself Robert Townsend, and a very young Mykelti Williamson a full decade before his most famous role as Bubba in Forrest Gump.
Quit putting it off! What about the leads? Well some of them seem to really get it. Rick Moranis plays the slimy manager and if you're used to his few iconic performances as nerds and dweebs (like Ghostbusters the same year) than his character, a wise-cracking schmuck on wheels, will come as a welcome surprise. He curses, he shoots guns, he talks in the same inflated tough guy patois as the actual tough guys, and its his big wad of cash that sets the whole rescue plot in motion; but he's still enough of a pain is the ass that somebody tells him "the only trouble kicking the shit out of you is that it'd be too easy."
Amy Madigan is probably best known today as Kevin Costner's wife in Field Of Dreams but she really kills it in the role of the tough girl who can hang with the tough guys. She's first seen beating up a bartender to get free drinks, and she's only goes uphill from there; sour looks, dirty hair, and ill-fitting mens clothes. Supposedly the sidekick to the hero was written as a big fat Mexican guy, but Madigan managed to win them over with her audition and the part was rewritten as a tomboy.
Willem Dafoe is Raven, the leader of the the fearsome biker gang The Bombers. Between his pale skin (even by his standards) and his weird 50's haircut, he looks just odd enough to seem a little less threatening (at least by normal movie villain standards) but that somehow makes him a little more threatening, sort of like Javier Bardem's similarly weird hair in No Country For Old Men. He kidnaps the hot girl rockstar played by Diane Lane, which kinda sidelines her for most of the movie, so other than being gorgeous and performing a few songs, she doesn't get to do much.
And then there's the lead Michael Pare who plays Tom Cody. He's not really bad, but he's definitely not on the level of his co-stars. He undersells the material which doesn't work in a larger than life setting. Whenever he had more than a few words to say, I kept thinking 'man I wish somebody like Bruce Willis had his part; oh man, especially 80's Bruce Willis, that woulda been fucking great!' Don't get me wrong, his performance serves just fine, but he's charisma challenged when compared to his costars, and he's supposed to be the lead. 'Archetypal' can become 'generic' pretty easily if the personality doesn't burst off the screen.
The finale is impressive enough to save even a much more flawed film than this. Some movies never have enough extras. No problem here. The biker gang starts to fill the streets in a long shot, and it's amazing to see shotgun-toting thug after shotgun-toting thug ride out on Harleys until the screen is choked with thirty or forty (maybe more). And more movies need a climactic pick-axe fight. I would be okay with other movies doing that too.
~ Ry Cooder, another Hill veteran, provides the soundtrack.
~ This film was murdelated during its release by Star Trek III: The Search For Spock. Budget: 14.5 Million Gross: 8 Million.
~ Hill envisioned a Tom Cody trilogy that was scuttled in the wake of this film's poisonous box office results, but 25 years later Michael Pare and prolific hack director Albert Pyun churned out a green screen sequel that will probably not inspire its own sequel 25 years later, not the least because it never ended up getting released.
Paragraph 8: "doesn't real work in a larger than life setting" should be "doesn't really work..."
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