John Badham

  • The Hard Way (1991)

    The Hard Way (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Let’s face it: building a buddy cop movie around a hardened non-nonsense police officer and a frivolous Hollywood actor trying to gather inspiration is an evergreen premise. It’s good to bring in both the gritty policework and the innate humour of an outsider, along with a pinch of Hollywood satire. (It was such a solid premise, in fact, that it’s shared with that other 1991 movie, Into the Sun, about which the less said, the better.) Being able to claim John Badham as a director is a further coup, and having no less than James Woods as the hard-boiled cop and Michael J. Fox as the Hollywood celebrity is just icing on the cake. With Stephen Lang as the serial killer and Annabella Sciorra as the love interest (along with briefer roles for an ensemble as diverse as Delroy Lindo, Luis Guzmán, L. L. Cool J, Christina Ricci and Lewis Black), everything is there for a competent Hollywood film. The Hard Way more or less meets those expectations, with a few issues along the way. Woods and Fox play each other off quite well, even through the rote sequences of early distrust and gradual bonding. The film isn’t so successful as blending the menace of its villain (a bit overdone for a comedy) and feels creepy in its depiction of a cop regularly practising police brutality, but scores a few hits in describing how a Hollywood megastar can have a few problems “going undercover” when everyone knows their name. The metafictional material doesn’t stop there, what with specific problems when the investigation movies inside a movie theatre that happens to be playing the movie in which the actor stars, and a rather elegant envoi that blurs the lines between the film’s reality and the movie it inspired. Much of The Hard Way is rather predictable, but that’s not a bad thing considering the practised skill through which it’s executed. Less interesting are the three or four climaxes that cap the picture—two would have been enough, three is excessive and four gets ridiculous, even though the best and most interesting sequence is kept in reserve for the final climax. The Hard Way isn’t some kind of undiscovered gem or early 1990s classic, but it’s good enough and slick enough to please even despite its flaws.

  • Bird on a Wire (1990)

    Bird on a Wire (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Point of No Return (1993)

    Point of No Return (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, May 2019) If you’re keeping track at home, 1993’s Point of No Return is the American remake of Luc Besson’s 1990 French film La Femme Nikita, and both of them can be said to have been prequels to the better-known 1995 film Léon. As a remake, if very close to the original—Americanized, for sure, but otherwise very similar in story beats and overall themes, and perhaps a bit less stupid than Besson’s script. The influences go deeper, of course—Nikita explicitly became not one but two TV shows, there’s a good case to be made for Alias tracing back its early-years lineage to either the French or American version of Nikita, Besson seems to be rewriting his female-assassin urtext every few years (Bandidas was in 2006, Colombiana was in 2011, Lucy was in 2014, Anna is next in 2019) and much of Milla Jovovich’s career seems to have been facilitated by this film. But progeny aside, what about Point of No Return? Well, as directed by John Badham it’s a serviceable action film. The suspense and action scenes can be effective despite their familiar nature, and that goes for much of the film as well—given the endless quasi-remakes of that story, the film does feel formulaic at this point, and even the little bits of interest illustrating the story don’t feel quite as fresh these days. Bridget Fonda does manage a very good action/drama performance, with some smaller but showy interventions by Gabriel Byrne and Harvey Keitel. Execution counts for a lot, and the early-1990s sheen of the film is fast approaching period-piece status, not to mention the trend-trendy filmmaking tracks of the film. The Nina Simone songs add a bit of colour, and Point of No Return frequently needs it.

  • Stakeout (1987)

    Stakeout (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2019) Here’s a hypothetical situation to test your skills at being a Hollywood producer. It’s not a hard one. Here you have a pair of actors starring in your movie as stakeout cops: Emilio Estevez (aged 25) and Richard Dreyfuss (aged 40). You also have the rather sexy Madeline Stowe (aged 29) playing a woman who’s being watched by our heroes. Naturally, there’s going to be a romance—that’s a given, not to be put in doubt. The question is this: Would you rather pair up Stowe with Estevez (four years her junior) or with Dreyfuss (eleven years her elder)? Take your time. Don’t cheat. There’s only one answer. But of course, this is Hollywood and at the time Dreyfuss was the biggest actor, so naturally we have a May-July romance going on. So it goes in an industry controlled by older men. Bad casting aside, Stakeout is merely a decent film. Veteran director John Badham’s attempt to combine comedy and action thrills is intermittently successful, although the film is more effective in its action moments that the often-juvenile comedy. The soundtrack is very eighties, but then so is much of the film as a buddy cop movie. There are a number of ethical issues raised by Stakeout’s romance (the word “stalking” is never mentioned, although it should be), but like most police movies of the time it’s far more interested in designating its heroes as beyond reproach than actually exploring those issues. Stakeout remains an entertaining film, but it does have a number of issues that may cause more discomfort than fun.

  • Blue Thunder (1983)

    Blue Thunder (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2017) You say “dated”, I say “period piece”. You say “techno-thrillers age poorly”, I say, “techno-thrillers preserve the obsessions of the time”. But mostly, I say that Blue Thunder remains far more relevant today than anyone would have expected. It is, for sure, a movie of its exact time: In 1983 Los Angeles, the police force experiments with a high-powered helicopter for crowd control in anticipation of the 1984 Olympic Games. The fancy titular helicopter brings together a package of high technology such as on-demand access to police databases, pervasive surveillance technology, stealth features, deadly weaponry and primitive augmented-reality targeting. Hot stuff—even if today, you could get nearly everything in that list in your average phone save for the weaponry. If the evolution of technology in older movies fascinates you, then Blue Thunder ought to be on your list of movies to watch given how clearly it exploits 1983’s cutting-edge … yet has quite a bit of relevance to today’s hot-button topics of government intrusion in private lives, and indiscriminate targeting of civilians in the name of security. You may want to ignore the plot along the way, though, given how many contrivances are required to set up the action sequences. On the other hand, come for the technology and stay for the action sequences, because Blue Thunder does eventually work its way to a spectacular prolonged action sequence above the skies of downtown Los Angeles, between helicopters and military jets, buildings and police cars. Director John Badham shows his mastery of action sequences here, to the point where they still compare well to contemporary movies. Roy Scheider is sympathetic enough as the protagonist, while Malcolm McDowell almost earns hissing as the villain. I expect a drone-centric remake any time soon. In the meantime, Blue Thunder is well worth revisiting, both for what it has to say (usually against its titular helicopter) and for the way it illustrates its message with well-executed action sequences.