John Carpenter might have cooked up the story for Black Moon Rising, but he clearly deemed it unworthy of his further attention, selling the screenplay to be brought to life by the far less talented Harley Cokeliss (Battletruck, Dream Demon). Tommy Lee Jones is the star of the show, playing professional thief Quint, who is hired by the government to steal tapes from a Las Vegas corporation being investigated for racketeering and tax evasion. Hiding the tapes in the back of an experimental prototype car called Black Moon, Quint runs into trouble when the vehicle is stolen by a ring of car thieves, who take it to the fortress-like lair of villain Ed Ryland (Robert Vaughn). Now it is up to Quint, the super-car's owners, and sexy car-jacker Nina (Linda Hamilton) to break into the building and try and retrieve the car and its precious cargo.
Jones is his usual gruff self, and lends this formulaic B-movie nonsense an air of class (although his unibrow is a little distracting) and Hamilton is a capable sidekick and love interest (the actress shedding her clothes for a brief sex scene), but, a couple of well-handled fight scenes aside, Cokeliss' direction is rather pedestrian. For a film about a car that can travel at incredible speed, the action is rather slow at times (the titular car spends much of the time in lock-up). The film's climax, in which the Black Moon leaps from one high-rise building to another, is barely worth the wait (although it obviously impressed someone enough for them to re-enact the scene, not once, but twice, in Fast and the Furious 7).
Jones is his usual gruff self, and lends this formulaic B-movie nonsense an air of class (although his unibrow is a little distracting) and Hamilton is a capable sidekick and love interest (the actress shedding her clothes for a brief sex scene), but, a couple of well-handled fight scenes aside, Cokeliss' direction is rather pedestrian. For a film about a car that can travel at incredible speed, the action is rather slow at times (the titular car spends much of the time in lock-up). The film's climax, in which the Black Moon leaps from one high-rise building to another, is barely worth the wait (although it obviously impressed someone enough for them to re-enact the scene, not once, but twice, in Fast and the Furious 7).