#4 in my ranking of Tony Scott’s filmography.
I don’t want to say that Tony Scott directing a script by Shane Black is a match made in heaven, but it did lead to Tony Scott’s best film since the start of his career directing feature films. The younger Scott is obviously someone who didn’t have much in the way of an eye for the building blocks of a good screenplay, and he was sometimes just a pawn for the erratic cinematic ambitions of Don Simpson. However, combining with Black’s solid approach to narrative, sarcastic wit in his dialogue, and deep appreciation of noir tropes meshes really well with Scott’s slick stylings to make an entertaining neo-noir action spectacle in the lines of Lethal Weapon and Scott’s later directorial work like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. This, of course, is an oversimplification since the script reportedly got butchered on set by both Joel Silver and Bruce Willis, but enough comes through that shows that Black and Scott were good together.
Something is rotten in the state of American football, and it’s evident in an opening, rain-drenched sequence that shows a player for the LA Stallions so desperate to win the game after a threatening call from a gangster that he pulls a gun out while running down field, shoots those in his way, and kills himself. This ends up being more of a sidepiece of the action and never the focus of the ensuing mystery, which is honestly kind of an odd way to start a film: flashy but mostly disconnected.
Anyway, the actual story centers on private investigator Joe (Willis) getting the job to watch and protect the exotic dancer Cory (Halle Berry) who happens to be the girlfriend of former LA Stallions quarterback, Jimmy (Damon Waynes), kicked out of the league for gambling. When Cory is shot and murdered leaving work, Joe and Jimmy end up working together to figure out what’s going on.
The core of this film is really that antagonistic friendship between the two main characters as they spout Shane Black insults back and forth at each other. Around them is built this noirish mystery where the end result is going to be a greedy figure out to increase his own wealth on the backs of those with less power. The central idea at that being the pursuit of legalized gambling (oh, how times have changed) for professional sports. The path that Joe and Jimmy have to take to figure that out goes from Cory’s trashed apartment through the toughs run by Sheldon Marcone (Noble Willingham), the local crime boss, and touching on Joe’s own past as a Secret Service agent who had saved the president’s life as well as confronted a senator for abusing a woman, which got him kicked off the Service. This is countered with Jimmy’s own past dealing with a dead wife and child, the physical demands of his job, and the spiral of drug addiction.
It’s surprisingly heavy stuff that the movie only touches on before moving in a new direction, never lingering on these dark facts for too long before the pair are back to quipping and getting punched in the face. That sense of self-effacing humor gets wrapped up in the solid, if underdeveloped, character stories and wound around the twisty-turny plot that recalls things like The Big Sleep. The sense of threat and danger that Joe and Jimmy get into is strong with good bad guy turns from actors like Taylor Negron as one of Marcone’s henchmen, a suitcase of explosives getting confused and misplaced, and even a solid excuse to have a character ride a horse onto the field of an ongoing football game.
This is very much a star vehicle for Willis and Wayans, giving them space to be charming and charismatic in that grungy, ironic, 90s sort of way, and Tony Scott is able to keep his camera calm enough in between his action scenes to allow space for his actors to do just that. I still think that Ridley has the greater talent between the two directorial brothers, but, matched with a solid script (no matter the interference from Silver and Willis), Scott knows enough to just let things on the page happen on the screen.
This is solid, 90s fun from Scott and Black, buoyed by fun performances, a good balance between comedy, drama, and action, and a smartly written, noir-inspired script. It’s fairly easily Scott’s best film so far in his career.
Originally published here
English (US) · 