When Edward Fox's stepdaughter and wife are abducted, he calls on her former husband, ex-cop and alcoholic Stacy Keach.
Michael Apted's feature film is pretty much a paint-by-numbers affair, and a grim one too. Like Get Carter, it doesn't soften anyone involved. Could this be the last, lingering loosening of the Production Code? Westerns had gotten rid of any softness or niceties in the 1960s, with the spaghetti westerns leading the way, but that genre had been dying off, in one form or another, since the 1920s. That calls for constant reinvention, boundary-pushing, and so forth. Crime and detective movies, however, have been steady money-makers since fiction movies began. True, the really grim ones like the Warner Brothers pre-codes, had been curbed by the Code, but how many malapropism-spewing henchmen with Brooklyn accents were there in reality?
This particular subgenre would reach mania with Charles Bronson and the "Dirty Harry" movies, before settling into the fantasy of Chuck Norris, and the current fantasy of things like the Fast & Furious franchise. The bad guys are not only kidnappers, they are gang rapists and murderers. Keach is not much more principled, coming out of aversion therapy for his boozing. Apted favors very quick edits; apparently he was not in favor of the shaky-cam school of camerawork, so this substitutes for that. The actors do what they can but there seems little depth in their characters. They are what they do.
That is a constant in Apted's later work, where people are often pushed into doing the right thing. Here, it's doing what it can with a script meant to shock rather than illuminate. If the location work makes it look authentic, well, that's good.
Michael Apted's feature film is pretty much a paint-by-numbers affair, and a grim one too. Like Get Carter, it doesn't soften anyone involved. Could this be the last, lingering loosening of the Production Code? Westerns had gotten rid of any softness or niceties in the 1960s, with the spaghetti westerns leading the way, but that genre had been dying off, in one form or another, since the 1920s. That calls for constant reinvention, boundary-pushing, and so forth. Crime and detective movies, however, have been steady money-makers since fiction movies began. True, the really grim ones like the Warner Brothers pre-codes, had been curbed by the Code, but how many malapropism-spewing henchmen with Brooklyn accents were there in reality?
This particular subgenre would reach mania with Charles Bronson and the "Dirty Harry" movies, before settling into the fantasy of Chuck Norris, and the current fantasy of things like the Fast & Furious franchise. The bad guys are not only kidnappers, they are gang rapists and murderers. Keach is not much more principled, coming out of aversion therapy for his boozing. Apted favors very quick edits; apparently he was not in favor of the shaky-cam school of camerawork, so this substitutes for that. The actors do what they can but there seems little depth in their characters. They are what they do.
That is a constant in Apted's later work, where people are often pushed into doing the right thing. Here, it's doing what it can with a script meant to shock rather than illuminate. If the location work makes it look authentic, well, that's good.