Bird on a Wire (1990)

(In French, On TV, May 2020) A good old-fashioned star vehicle combining action and romance, Bird on a Wire is about as generic and calculated a box-office bid as you can imagine—but it does work if you’re a fan of the actors involved. Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn star as, respectively, a fugitive informant and his ex-girlfriend who finds herself on the run along with him after a chance encounter. As a pretext for chases and kisses, that’s all you need: action director John Badham dutifully handles the mayhem. The plot here clearly takes a backseat to the checkbox-ticking required of such craven crowd-pleasers: clear character-establishing introductions, one car chase to kick off the plot, one bedroom sequence, some funny bickering between exes, more action beats as the story moves from one location to another, and a sailing into the sunset finale. The story is familiar and plodding in order to let the stars show off why they were hired—the belligerent romantic tension is made-to-order, and the villains are merely perfunctory. But while some of the execution looks stodgy today (action scene standards are much higher than they used to be), Bird on a Wire will work if you like the earlier incarnations of Hawn and Gibson—what’s notable here is how she is ten years older than him, which is a still unusual-enough age pairing when it’s usually twenty years in the other direction. Overall, Bird on a Wire is not bad but not good either and more of a demonstration of circa-1990 Gibson and Hawn on autopilot than anything else.