It shoulda-coulda have been better.
Directed by William Kaufman. Written By Chad Law and Evan Law. Cinematography by Mark Rutledge, and Music by Deane Ogden.
The film stars Cuba Gooding Jr., Cole Hauser, Jonathan LaPaglia, and Ginny Weirick. Only Cuba Gooding was familiar to me, and mostly from publicity for his other flicks.
I have seen him in Coming To America, Gladiator, and maybe one or two other films. Nothing of any outstanding importance to me anyway in the last 40 years. But that is irrelevant he does a good job here. The other "star" for me was the city of Spokane, Washington a place I knew well back in the 1980s.
 |
| Jonas Arbor (Cuba Gooding Jr.) |
 |
| Seattle |
Spokane. Washington. Allan Campbell (Cole Hauser), looser. He's having a bad day. He owes money to a bookie who wants to collect yesterday. He's a fuck up executive who has been screwed out of a promotion at his company by an ass kissing new hire who stole his idea. His boss is an asshole.
 |
| Allan Campbell (Cole Hauser) |
 |
| His boss and the ass kisser who gets the promotion |
The extra cash he was counting on from promotion was going to cover his gambling debts. Allan is also a drunk who has problems satisfying his wife. He probably cant get it up. So she goes trolling her assets at his best friend, wanting to ride the baloney pony.
His best friend accommodates. That whole cuckold sequence is pretty laughable, it right out of a early sixties sexploitation flick where the guy is making love wearing his pants while the woman is in a slip. Lame. Allan, depressed, leaves work early and happens upon the tryst. He goes off on a bender.
 |
| his good friend |
Jonas Arbor (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is a professional hit man, a killing machine trained by the US government. Ex war et. He had an assignment for a hit in Seattle. It doesn't happen. He doesn't report in. His bosses think he's gone rogue.
Allan heads to the Lamp Post Tavern There he meets Jonas who has just wasted a controversial talk show host Jim O'Bannon along with his two bodyguards. Allan pours out his woes to Jonas. Jonas tells him that all his problems stem from him being weak.
Jonas Arbor: I am your friend, Allan. Because I got the balls to be brutally honest with you. Complete and total openness, no skipping paragraphs. Everybody else in your life is full of shit.
Jonas tells Allan that he's a professional hit man and he wants him to pretend that he just paid him a substantial amount of money to make five people dead. Jonas tells him to write down five names.
Allan at first doesn't believe him but he plays along.
He thinks Jonas is some kind of barroom shrink. So Allan plays along and writes down Fred Gates the name of his boss, then Brian Felzner the guy that got his promotion, next Dom Escarto the bookie, then his ex best friend Mike Dodd, top of the list is his wife Sydney Campbell.
 |
| Here is a sequence that homages The Manchurian Candidate |
Allan gives Jonas the list, then gets up to take a leak. When he steps back into the bar room hes now in Noirsville. Jonas has disappeared and people on the list start dying.
Noirsville
The film from a good starting premise, unfortunately, evolved more into into an action flick, and I wish they would have made more use of Spokane.
As a New Yorker living in exile in Montana in the 70s, 80s, and 90s I remember being really impressed with Spokane for its legitimate big city feel and smell combined with a Los Angeles/Las Vegas faux Western garnish that had a crumbling grittiness. All that was book-ended with the impressive Spokane River Falls and various cataracts with its multitudes of bridges and the massive intruding rail network of a city that was an intersection of three transcontinental railways, The Northern Pacific, The Great Northern, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific and there was also a connecting spur of a fourth, the Union Pacific making it an important rail shipping and public transportation hub for the entire Inland Empire. Barely any of this Spokane is shown in the film, a shame. What you get is one shot of the river and a couple of shots of a railway underpass. As is it you just as well should have shot it around Hollywood.
The final denouement drags on a bit too much for its own good. There are way too many deserted floors in the police station. I even caught repeated shots as if even with all that they try to cram into it they still needed a few more minutes to hit the hour and thirty minutes run time. A lame Neo Noir time waster. 5-6/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment