CAST: Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Will Patton, George Dzundza, Howard Duff, Fred Dalton Thompson, Jason Bernard, Iman
REVIEW:
No Way Out stands in worthy company alongside other ’80s and early ’90s thriller such as Narrow Margin (also featuring Gene Hackman): meat-and-potatoes thrillers that deliver enough mounting tension and suspense to override some plot contrivances and unlikelihoods.
Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) is a Naval officer newly assigned to work for Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman). But Farrell and Brice share more than an office: Farrell has started a steamy clandestine affair with Susan Atwell (Sean Young), who does double duty as Brice’s mistress. And when Brice gets wind of another man and accidentally kills her in a jealous rage, Brice’s fanatically loyal aid Scott Pritchard (Will Patton) orchestrates a cover-up under the guise of a secret investigation, scapegoating “Yuri”, a long-rumored, never-seen Soviet spy who can pass as an American and has infiltrated the Pentagon, as Susan’s killer. The plan seems perfect: the investigation is hunting a ghost. But Farrell finds himself being steadily sucked into a downward spiral of trouble the closer the investigation comes to identifying him, Susan’s secret lover, as the suspect in her death.
No Way Out borrows a page or two from Hitchcock in the way it continually ups the ante. Things start slowly for the first half hour or so, as we see Farrell in hot-and-heavy bliss with Susan. Then Ms. Atwell makes her exit, and Farrell is trapped in an impossible situation, helping run an investigation that will lead to his own destruction (unless he can steer it off course), that seems to have, as the title states, “no way out”.
Kevin Costner gives (by his standards) a forceful and energetic performance, probably one of his best, although the material isn’t long on character development (the characters are pawns in the unwinding plot that none of them quite has a complete grip on, even when they think they do). Farrell is a tricky character; since he knows something no one around him knows, and wants to keep it that way, Costner always has to stay stoic and collected, but also project the tension building minute by minute as he feels increasingly trapped. Gene Hackman is his usual reliable self as Brice, but other than the big “Susan’s demise” scene, he doesn’t have all that much to do. Brice isn’t “evil”, so much as weak; he comes crawling miserably to Scott like a little boy who made a mess and wants it cleaned up before Daddy finds out (incidentally, Hackman plays a virtually identical character years later in the Clint Eastwood thriller Absolute Power). Will Patton’s obsessively devoted aid is the real villain of the movie, and dives right in with a kind of hyper-efficient glee bubbling beneath his self-righteous unctuousness, going off on his own little power trip while masterminding a cover-up to protect the boss he worships. The throwaway bit of dialogue in which Scott is revealed to be gay is a bit of a homophobic cheap shot (typical of ’70s and ’80s thrillers in which homosexuals, if they appeared, were invariably the villains), but it certainly gives insight into his devotion to Brice. Sean Young is adequate in her limited screentime, and we have George Dzundza as a friend of Farrell’s, and Howard Duff and Fred Dalton Thompson as Washington rivals of Brice and Iman (Mrs. David Bowie) as a friend of Susan’s.
Director Roger Donaldson and cinematographer John Alcott (on his last film, which is dedicated to his memory) make the halls of the Pentagon a labrynthine maze that seems to grow more claustrophobic as time goes on. Like good thrillers, if every detail doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, it at least gives enough steadily rising tension that we don’t take too much notice. The only inadvertant source of humor is two Prichard-hired mercenaries (Marshall Bell and Chris D.), who are about the most buffoonishly goofy-looking pair who could have been cast (the fact that Chris D. runs like a frantic bird trying to take flight doesn’t help take him any more seriously, especially since he does quite a bit of running).
Setting up fast-paced twisty-turny intrigue within walls that inexorably close in on the main character, No Way Out is a solid ’80s thriller in the Hitchcockian tradition, and stick around for the epilogue, which supplies a surprise twist curveball, even though, as left-field as it seems, once you think back through the movie, the clues pointing to it were scattered along the way. Continue reading
DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST:
Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, William Hope, Mark Rolston, Al Matthews
REVIEW:
Aliens, along with James Cameron’s sci-fi hit five years later, 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day , is both among the best sci-fi action thrillers ever made, and a rare example of a sequel surpassing the original. Continue reading
DIRECTOR: Peter Weir
CAST:
Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Lukas Haas, Jan Rubes, Alexander Godunov, Josef Sommer, Danny Glover, Patti LuPone, Brent Jennings, Angus MacInnes
REVIEW:
Witness is billed as a thriller or a crime drama, but that’s just the plot skeleton. What it’s really about at its core is love and longing, and about how the randomness of life can throw two people into contact long enough to fall in love, even if they can never truly be together. Continue reading
DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST:
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bess Motta, Rick Rossovich, Earl Boen
REVIEW:
The stars were aligned for the cast and crew that came together to make the original Terminator. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Mr. Universe, had made his break into the movie business with 1982’s Conan the Barbarian. Together with this and 1986’s Aliens and 1989’s The Abyss (both also directed by James Cameron), Michael Biehn seemed set to become a major star, but never again reached his nearly A-list heights after the 1980s. Linda Hamilton was a relative newcomer (and future, now ex Mrs. James Cameron), and like Biehn, Terminator and its sequel would be the high point of her career. And bringing it all together was a then-unknown filmmaker named James Cameron, who was previously art director for zero-budget B-movie legend Roger Corman, and his previous directorial effort had been the inauspicious Piranha 2: The Spawning. Inspired by two television episodes written by Harlan Ellison (who sued for and later received official credit), the Outer Limits episode “Soldier” (about two time-traveling soldiers who travel back in time to 1964, where they fight to the death), and the Twilight Zone episode “Demon with a Glass Hand” (about a time-traveling robot that looks human), and his own nightmare about a killer robot sent from the future to murder him, Cameron wrote the original story for what became The Terminator while sick and bedridden in Rome. Working alongside him to bring it to fruition was producer (and another ex-wife-to-be) and fellow Corman alum, Gale Anne Hurd. In the hands of this cast and crew, The Terminator exploded from the cult film it was expected to be into a sci-fi/action classic that revolutionized the genre.
Continue readingDIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
CAST:
Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt
REVIEW:
In some ways, Alien could be seen as moving the Halloween-style slasher horror movie into outer space, but its achievement was more than that. While the best-known sci-fi at the time was the fairly lightweight Star Wars and Star Trek, with Alien Ridley Scott looked through the glass darkly. The movie is a dark experience, a slow-moving thriller that gradually and inexorably builds up the suspense until certain scenes and the climax in particular ascend to nerve-wracking tension. It’s the kind of movie that’s dark and harrowing to the extent that it’s questionable to call it conventionally “enjoyable”, but it is undeniably skillful filmmaking that shows a keen understanding of building suspense. Continue reading
DIRECTOR: John Schlesinger
CAST:
Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider, Marthe Keller, William Devane, Fritz Weaver, Richard Bright, Marc Lawrence
REVIEW:
‘Is it safe?‘ No one who has viewed John Schlesinger’s gritty thriller Marathon Man will soon forget those three simple words, or look at dentists the same way again. Continue reading
CAST:
Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
REVIEW:
Dun dun. dun dun. dun dun dun dun dun dun. So begins Jaws, with the instantly recognizable, singularly ominous score from the prolific John Williams and one of the most chillingly memorable prologues in movie history. Continue reading
DIRECTOR: Fred Zinnemann
CAST: Edward Fox, Michael Lonsdale, Tony Britton, Derek Jacobi, Cyril Cusack, Ronald Pickup
REVIEW:
Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of The Jackal, adapted from Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel of the same name, is a masterfully executed piece of filmmaking methodically setting all its many pieces in motion like a fine watch. Its dry, almost documentary style and slow burn pace might not be appreciated by modern viewers demanding something flashier and more action-oriented (while this is considered a suspense thriller, it’s not an action movie and those who go in expecting such may be disappointed and bored), but for those to whom this kind of movie appeals, it’s hard to imagine this material being more masterfully executed, or an assassination plot and the investigation opposing it being written with more meticulous logic.
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