Movie Review: Under Siege (1992)

Genre: Action Thriller  

Director: Andrew Davis  

Starring: Steven Seagal, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Busey  

Running Time: 103 minutes  

Synopsis: The USS Missouri battleship is commandeered by terrorists led by rogue CIA Agent Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones) and the ship's Executive Officer Krill (Gary Busey), using a surprise party for the captain as a ruse. The ship's cook is ex-Navy SEAL Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal), and he teams up with ex-Playboy playmate Jordan Tate (Erika Eleniak) to disrupt the terrorists' plot to transfer the battleship's nuclear missiles onto a North Korean submarine for sale to the highest bidder.

What Works Well: This is a straightforward Die Hard On A Battleship thriller, infused with enough attitude to establish a separate identity. The bad-guy duo of Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey luxuriate in bewildering unpredictability as they dance on the edge of madness, Busey dressing up as a woman for the fake captain's party, Jones channeling his inner has-been or never-was rock star. Steven Seagal provides the rational stoic counterweight with few words but plenty of one-liners and impressive kills, and Erika Eleniak contributes quirky presence as the centerfold caught way outside her comfort zone.

What Does Not Work As Well: The B-grade script serves up oversized logic holes, and the nefarious plot gets more muddled and less impressive with every passing scene. The terrorists are resourceful enough to take over a battleship but possess no coherent follow-up plan, while back at Navy headquarters, the impotent crisis mis-management team of military commanders gather around a table and flirt with an awful unintended satire of Dr. Strangelove.

Key Quote:

Jordan Tate: You're not a cook.

Casey Ryback: Yeah, well... I also cook.

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Movie Review: Point Break (1991)

Genre: Crime Thriller  

Director: Kathryn Bigelow  

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Gary Busey, Lori Petty  

Running Time: 122 minutes  

Synopsis: In Los Angeles, rookie FBI Agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is partnered with veteran Agent Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey) and tasked to investigate bank robberies committed by men wearing masks of ex-US Presidents. Pursuing clues suggesting the criminals may be surfers, Johnny goes undercover and meets Tyler (Lori Petty), who teaches him to surf and becomes his lover. Johnny's suspicions eventually centre on legendary surfer Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), who leads a group of friends pursuing the easy life.

What Works Well: This is a bold, loud, and larger-than-life thriller, sacrificing plot coherence for the spectacle of brash men embracing insane risks. Not satisfied with tackling monstrous waves, director Kathryn Bigelow takes long detours to a couple of skydiving highlights, and finds time for one unrelated gang shoot-out, several bank robberies, and a few high energy chases. Donald Peterman's expansive cinematography enhances the breathless action, and while Reeves and Swayze never really have to act, they do ride the thrill waves with alpha male authority.

What Does Not Work As Well: After some early perfunctory police work, any pretense of a disciplined investigation is jettisoned in favour of Johnny and Bodhi circling each other like a couple of territorial bulls in the wild. The action diverges from logic at an alarming pace, and the uniformly humorless tone suggests protagonists unaware of their increasingly ridiculous context.

Conclusion: Boisterously bloated bravura. 



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Movie Review: The Last American Hero (1973)

Also Known As: Hard Driver

Genre: Biographical Motor Racing Drama

Director: Lamont Johnson

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Art Lund, Gary Busey, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ned Beatty, William Smith, Ed Lauter

Running Time: 95 minutes

Synopsis: In the southern United States, "Junior" Jackson (Jeff Bridges) drives hard and fast on backcountry roads, evading police while transporting whiskey illegally distilled by his father Elroy (Art Lund). When Elroy is yet again imprisoned, Junior has to support his mother (Geraldine Fitzgerald) and brother (Gary Busey). He enters his first demolition derby at the track run by Hackel (Ned Beatty), then graduates to NASCAR racing. Junior tangles with ruthless team owner Burton Colt (Ed Lauter) and fierce competitor Kingman (William Smith), and learns about big league romance with Marge (Valerie Perrine).

What Works Well: Based on the early racing experiences of NASCAR star Junior Johnson, director Lamont Johnson (no relation) soulfully evokes the American dream, where fame and fortune are within reach but only when talent finds a calling. Cinematographer George Silano enjoys the expanse of forgotten country roads littered with men itching for a chase or a fight, and later conveys motor racing thrills with plenty of dusty verve but never at the expense of the people behind the wheels. Jim Croce's I Got A Name perfectly complements the quest for purpose, while Jeff Bridges navigates Junior's growth with a balanced mix of arrogance, confidence, and when necessary, the humility to learn as fast as he drives.

What Does Not Work As Well: Other than Junior, all the other characters are confined to pre-defined notes. A longer running time would have allowed expanded roles for the many other grizzled veteran characters and deeper involvement from Junior's parents (Art Lund elevates every scene he is in, but Geraldine Fitzgerald is largely wasted). 

Conclusion: The satisfying roar of engines propels a classic rise-of-the-underdog story.



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Movie Review: Big Wednesday (1978)

A story of friendship among a group of surfers, Big Wednesday carries natural appeal to surfing fans, but is less successful in capturing coming-of-age dynamics.

Starting in the early 1960s, the lives of three California surfer friends intertwine. Matt Johnson (Jan-Michael Vincent) is the most talented, but drinks heavily. Leroy "The Masochist" Smith (Gary Busey) is the wild one, while Jack Barlow (William Katt) is the steadiest. Life consists of surfing, partying, and trips to Mexico, and all the surfers in this community look up to Bear (Sam Melville), a surfboard designer and permanent fixture on the pier. 

Jack finds a girlfriend in Sally (Patti D'Arbanville), while Matt's girlfriend Peggy (Lee Purcell) announces an unexpected pregnancy. As the years pass Matt and Peggy stay together and raise their daughter, but he struggles with his drinking and fading legacy. The guys try to finagle a way to avoid the military draft by faking various physical and mental conditions, except for Jack, who willingly signs up and serves in Vietnam. The lives of the friends drift apart, but just as Bear predicted, an epic day of huge waves in the early 1970s has the potential to bring them back together.

If Big Wednesday was as profound as it wanted to be, it may have been excellent. Unfortunately, the film's opening 30 minutes reduces male friendship to brawling together, limiting the depth of meaningful brotherhood. The first act reveals director and co-writer John Milius' love of surfing (the film is semi-autobiographical), but stumbles on a foodfight and two back-to-back fistfights, one on each side of the US/Mexico border. Little beyond the obvious is ever revealed about Matt, Leroy, and Jack, the dialogue is often obscured by the sound of roaring waves or speeding traffic, and an unidentified narrator drowns in platitudinal waves.

The second and third acts are better but still disjointed. The draft-dodging sequence showcases ingenuity and is funny, but seems to drop in from another movie. Once the trio is separated, Milius starts to find some eloquent tones. Nostalgia and a pining for the old days kick-in, and an effective Jan-Michael Vincent takes over at the heart of the story. The finale is epic in both emotion and wave size, cinematographer Bruce Surtees along with a special water unit and stunt doubles capturing magnificent surfing action.

Bear experiences his own dryland success and failure, and provides good mystical glue connecting the past, present, and future through omnipresence, prophetic prose, and the one-of-a-kind board for the day-that-shall-come. Big Wednesday rides the waves, and finds as many bombs as wipeouts.

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Movie Review: Insignificance (1985)

A drama imagining a hypothetical meeting of four icons from the 1950s, Insignificance poses a speculative question then flounders in search of an interesting answer.

The setting is New York, and although the four main characters are never named, the representations are obvious. On the night Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell) shoots the blowing-skirt-above-the-grate scene for The Seven Year Itch witnessed by a mass of onlookers, Albert Einstein (Michael Emil) is holed up in a hotel room preparing for a conference. Senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis) is in town trying to pressure Einstein into admitting he is a communist sympathizer. And Marilyn's husband Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey) is despondent, watching the world ogle his wife.

Over one long night the four characters meet in pairs in Einstein's room, engaging in conversations on a variety of topics. An elevator attendant (Will Sampson) interacts with a few of them.

Writer Terry Johnson adapts his stage play to the screen, and admittedly, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio walk into a hotel...is a potentially compelling introduction to a joke or a skit. But despite oodles of style, director Nicolas Roeg cannot hide the subsequent lack of substance. Beyond the initial what if curiosity, Insignificance fizzles.

So Marilyn is not a dumb blonde and can take a (clumsy) crack at explaining the theory of relativity. Reciprocating the role reversal, Einstein responds by revealing his legs, and is not beyond considering a sexual escapade, although he is resolute in refusing to humour McCarthy's accusations. Meanwhile the Senator's frolic with a prostitute is compromised by his erectile dysfunction. And Joe DiMaggio is exactly who he is, a gum-chewing ballplayer deeply in love with his wife, but tired of her prolonged absences and forced to share her with millions of fans.

Roeg scatters flashback snippets to the childhoods of the four characters in a superficial attempt to explain what shaped their psyche, and makes an effort to infuse some visual splendour as an antidote to the nondescript hotel room hosting most of the dialogue. The ending attempts to layer Einstein's worst nightmare on top of the already imagined drama, and by this stage the film is gasping for any oxygen to relieve the tedium.

With four character sharing the screen time, the actors are unable to meaningfully delve beneath the make-up. Insignificance is a compelling set-up with a limp punchline.



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Movie Review: Predator 2 (1990)

A science fiction gory action thriller, Predator 2 moves the setting from the jungle to Los Angeles and loses much of the original's identity in the process.

It's the near future of 1997. On the streets of Los Angeles, heavily armed Colombian and Jamaican drug gangs battle in the open, with the police force caught in the middle, outmanned and outgunned. Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) and his small team consisting of Detective Danny Archuleta (Ruben Blades) and Detective Leona Cantrell (Maria Conchita Alonso) do their best, but are stunned when one gunbattle ends with the inexplicable ritual slaughter of many gang members.

A powerful alien predator is on the loose, targeting anyone with a weapon, and possessing advanced killing tools and the ability to bend light to appear invisible. With the situation on the street spiralling out of control, new recruit Detective Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton) joins Harrigan's crew, while the federal government sends in Special Agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey) and his team to assert control. Keyes and Harrigan immediately clash, but the slaughter continues.

With Arnold Schwarzenegger passing on the sequel, the franchise loses its biggest draw. Danny Glover is an adequate replacement, but does not come close to projecting the necessary charisma or sheer physical stature and stamina needed to confront the alien hunter. As a result, Predator 2 seeps credibility the closer it trundles towards the one-on-one climax.

In the run-up to the final showdown, the film is more urban action thriller with plenty of gore than a science fiction horror film. Director Stephen Hopkins stages several high octane battle scenes as an out of control drug war grips Los Angeles, with the Predator stealthily claiming victims according to his own honourable terms of combat. Plenty of noisy energy fills the screen as the body count mounts and buckets of blood ooze onto the floor and splatter the walls, but nothing distinguishes the film from most other bullet-rich movies willing to uncork bloodshed.

The subplot of federal forces arriving on the scene to take control of the streets cues plenty of reciprocal and sweaty hissing between Glover's Harrigan and Busey's Keyes, but the tension between the two men is largely wasted.

Predator 2 is not bad at anything it does; just comprehensively undistinguished.

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Movie Review: Carny (1980)

A drama set in the world of a small-time touring carnivals, Carny lacks plot but is rich in characters and mood.

Frankie (Gary Busey) and Patch (Robbie Robertson) are members of The Great American Carnival. Frankie plays The Mighty Bozo, a dunk-tank antagonist, while Patch collects the money and helps run the business. The carnival includes the typical assortment of rides, rigged pay-per-play games, a strip show and several sideshows exploiting various physical conditions, with scams aplenty to maximize profit. One evening bored teenager Donna (Jodie Foster) attends with her boyfriend Mickey (Craig Wasson). She quickly establishes a connection with Frankie, runs away from home and joins the carnival.

As the ramshackle tour moves from town to town, Donna comes between Frankie and Patch. She tries to make herself useful by joining the strip show, a trial that goes awry. At every small town Patch has to bribe the right officials to ignore the carnival's more sordid corners. When he tangles with an exceptionally oily businessman demanding more than the usual payout, the consequences are severe.

Directed by Robert Kaylor, better known as a documentarian, Carny is co-written and co-produced by Robertson, much better known as The Band's lead guitarist and main songwriter. And this non-traditional partnership is largely responsible for a unique look and feel. Carny defies any easy categorizations, and is a movie to be experienced rather than analyzed.

Despite the 1980 release date Carny owes more to the 1970s in being character driven, soaking up atmosphere and proceeding with blissful disregard for conventional narrative structures. Kaylor allows his cameras to roam, always finding the more interesting perspectives and capturing the pathetic nighttime energy of a touring event scrapping for survival. There is nothing glamorous about this neon-drenched life on the road, except that it is a life on the road, where what happened yesterday can be disregarded because something else will happen somewhere else today.

At the core of the non-events is a ten year mostly unspoken friendship between Frankie and Patch, the barely-in-control-brawn and the calm-and-collected brains, Frankie in the cage generating fury and Patch outside exploiting the anger. The one theme of the film is the struggle to maintain a functional connection between two men when a woman arrives on the scene, with the added tension of Donna being - maybe - just on the right side of 18, and a runaway.

Gary Busey has rarely been better - or more fearsome. The opening sequence of Frankie applying face makeup to transform into The Mighty Bozo is hypnotizing, and Busey's manic energy in the cage jumps off the screen. Robbie Robertson is an ideal counterbalance, tall, lanky, almost too laid back as he thinks through every situation. Jodie Foster's Donna is a perfect disruptive presence as she tries to find her place into the carnival's routine, the young woman's burgeoning sexuality so much fuel on an already unstable fire.

In addition to Wasson, the supporting cast includes Elisha Cook Jr. as the resident grizzled veteran, Meg Foster as the game maiden who unleashes Donna's inner tiger, Kenneth McMillan, and Fred Ward.

Carny glides towards a climax where the carnival also bares its teeth as a house of horrors. It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt, and then a different set of rules apply.

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Movie Review: A Star Is Born (1976)

A romantic drama musical, A Star Is Born is primarily a Barbra Streisand concert with a bit of plot thrown in around the sides.

Rock star John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) is rapidly burning out, late to his own concerts, addicted to booze and too jaded to care any more. One night he stumbles into a bar where lounge singer Esther Hoffman (Streisand) is performing, and an attraction develops. He subsequently pushes her onto the stage during a show, where her unrehearsed performance draws raves.

John and Esther get married, her career takes off while his fades away. Their marriage suffers from ups and downs, but his impetuous behaviour isn't conducive to a long-term happy union.

The third screen treatment of the story after the 1937 and 1954 versions, the 1976 film is by far the weakest. Although the decision to relocate the story from the world of film studios to the anarchic rock arena is a good one, the pacing, character development, and relationship dynamics are all poorly handled.

Directed by Frank Pierson and co-produced by Streisand, A Star Is Born gets bogged down early and often in prolonged scenes featuring Streisand belting out a succession of songs, and neither the drama nor the romance are provided an opportunity to gain traction. The cinematography and editing lack dynamism, and the film is surprisingly energy deprived. The love theme Evergreen became an international hit, and the film's soundtrack album was a massive seller, but none of that makes for a good movie.

Despite the bloated 140 minutes of running time, the narrative is delivered in plot-challenged shorthand. The few exchanges of intelligible dialogue contain contrived and painfully bad lines that fuel often ridiculous emotional vacillations. The supporting cast is non-existent (Gary Busey and Paul Mazursky fade in and mostly out of the background), and Streisand the actress never comes close to convincing as an undiscovered talent.

A montage sequence features artistic scenes of passionate romance, and Kristofferson is often the best thing on view, delivering a sinewy performance propelled by copious amounts of booze and filled with implied self-hate. But his character doesn't get the opportunity to complete even one song. Instead the screen is filled with Streisand for long periods in a display of unchecked egotism. At the climax, she gets about 10 minutes of uninterrupted close-up time encompassing her final performance and the end credits.

A Star Is Born unabashedly celebrates Streisand as a star chanteuse, but as a movie experience, it offers big hair and precious little else.

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The Movies Of Gary Busey

All movies starring Gary Busey and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Last American Hero (1973)

A Star Is Born (1976)

Straight Time (1978)

Big Wednesday (1978)

Carny (1980)

Insignificance (1985)

Lethal Weapon (1987)

Predator 2 (1990)

Point Break (1991)

The Player (1992, as himself)

Under Siege (1992)

The Firm (1993)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Straight Time (1978)

A fine example of street-level 1970s filmmaking, Straight Time presents a downcast story of a man looking for a break but unable to escape his past. Dustin Hoffman delivers a gritty performance as an ex-con briefly tasting freedom but finding the lawful life most unwelcoming.

Max Dembo (Hoffman) is released from prison after serving a six year sentence for armed robbery. He makes a seemingly genuine attempt to earn an honest living despite the bullying presence of his parole officer Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh). Max meets Jenny (Theresa Russell) at an employment office, and they start a tentative relationship as he secures a grimy apartment and an unglamorous job at a canning factory.

But an unfortunate encounter with Willy (Gary Busey), a former colleague from his criminal days, derails all of Max's effort to go straight, and lands him on the wrong side of Earl's intentions. Max snaps, humiliates Earl by chaining him to a fence on a freeway median, and slips back into a life of crime. With Jerry Schue (Harry Dean Stanton) as a partner, he embarks on a crime wave that soon turns bloody.

The ease with which Max get back to grips with a life of hold-ups, guns, greed, shady characters and murder betrays his earlier attempts to reintegrate into society. Earl's boorishness was just the first in what would have been many obstacles for Max to overcome to go straight, and his tendency for violence and comfort with brutality are clear indicators that he never really stood a chance. It is to Hoffman's credit that for the first part of the film, we believe that his struggle for civility is well intentioned, and this makes his about-face and headlong dive back into violence a memorably jarring transition.

M. Emmet Walsh is deliciously hateable, a man whose instinctive mistrust of ex-cons proves to be both well-placed and a self-perpetuating stance. Gary Busey nails Willy as a dim-witted, jovial bear of a man, a victim since the day nature handed out intelligence. Smarter but no less ill-fated is Harry Dean Stanton's Jerry, a reluctant rifle man, unable to resist the buzz of the hold-up but equally unable to control Max's excesses. Kathy Bates appears in a small but memorable role as Willy's wife.

Theresa Russell's Jenny is fresh-faced and innocent, a 1960's left-over deep into the desperate 1970's. Her character is the only odd fit in the movie, Jenny's desperation to fall for and then stay with a man having a shadowy past and no future prospects left unexplained.

Director Ulu Grosbard finds the more dank corners of Los Angeles to place Max's story, easily overcoming the absence of New York by further degrading Max in the city of supposed dreams and opportunity. Grosbard keeps Max at the centre of the story and the enigmatic Hoffman in the middle of the frame, with no chance to escape to the edges of his natural tendencies.

Straight Time is a story of lost hope and preordained destiny. There may be a willingness to change the course of a life, but sometimes the gravitational pull of history determines the future.

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Movie Review: The Firm (1993)

A sprawling legal epic, The Firm is a smart thriller that veers away from the excesses of the genre in favour of emphasizing the human drama. An extraordinarily deep cast succeeds in maintaining interest over the 150 minutes of running length.

The Firm has a simple premise with complex details. Young Harvard law school graduate Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) has his pick of job offers from all the top law firms, but the boutique Memphis firm of Bendini, Lambert and Locke make him an offer he can't refuse. Lured by a high salary, a large house and a luxury car, Mitch moves to Memphis with his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn). The firm assigns senior lawyer Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) to mentor Mitch, and soon they are jetting off to the Cayman Islands to provide tax advice to shady characters. Mitch is seduced at the beach by a local beauty, an encounter that yields conveniently compromising photos that the firm can use against him as needed.

Mitch soon learns the firm mostly provides money laundering services to the mob. When two lawyers are blown up for planning to quit, FBI agent Wayne Terrance (Ed Harris) starts sniffing around, and Mitch is fingered as a potential inside man who can collect the evidence to bring the corrupt lawyers down. With head of security (Wilford Brimley) and his henchmen on his tail, Mitch has to plan the destruction of his employer while saving his career.

The Firm's drama centres around the conflict between three characters, brought to life by Cruise, Tripplehorn and Hackman. The relationship between Mitch and Abby McDeere is the first casualty of the firm's dominance, Mitch's long hours proving to be the lesser evil as the true nature of the client list is revealed and Mitch falls for the oldest trick in the book on the sandy beaches of the Cayman Islands. While Cruise and Tripplehorn make for a believable young couple, with Cruise's intense eyes working in his favour as the driven idealistic lawyer, Tripplehorn is slightly less convincing as Abby, both the role and the movie slightly exceeding her range.

As the McDeere marriage buckles, Avery is nurturing his relationship with Mitch, mentoring him in the fine art of tax evasion and smoothly sliding him into the role of the mob's lawyer. Hackman was born to play roles like Avery Tolar, the manipulative maverick who applies his own rules and plays both sides against the middle. The Firm makes its way to an interesting crossroads by ultimately matching Abby with Avery in a dangerous encounter pivotal to Mitch's survival, with both Abby and Avery risking everything, albeit in different ways, for the sake of Mitch's career.

Director Sydney Pollack surrounds Cruise, Tripplehorn, and Hackman with a stellar cast of stalwarts. Hal Holbrook, Wilford Brimley, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, David Strathairn and Gary Busey flesh out every secondary character and help carry the load of a convoluted but sturdy story.

Too often, movie adaptations of legal thrillers degenerate into a rapidly mounting body count and stock chase scenes, chucking all reality to one side. While The Firm does not avoid all the pitfalls, it sidesteps most of them. The screenplay team of David Rabe, Robert Towne and David Rafiel deserve credit for adapting John Grisham's novel into a coherent movie that places characters ahead of stunts. The Firm keeps Mitch, Abby and Avery at centre stage, insecurities as prominent as abilities, and none of them suddenly develop the powers of secret agents.

At the core of The Firm is a young lawyer using his legal skills and intellect to find a way out the mess that he finds himself in, a welcome celebration of brains over brawn.

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Movie Review: Lethal Weapon (1987)

A cop buddy movie that benefits enormously from one of the most eccentric and memorable police officers created for the screen.

Los Angeles Detective Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is depressed, suicidal, utterly unpredictable, and a deadly former military sharp shooter. In the hands of screenwriter Shane Black and director Richard Donner, Riggs is also somehow real. Edgy, unconventional and dangerous, but never straying into ridiculous territory. The film rides smoothly in Riggs' slipstream, as he and straight-laced, 50-year-old partner Detective Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) set their sights on breaking up a ruthless drug cartel. Glover as Murtaugh, a middle-aged family man comfortably settled in the suburbs, is the perfect antithesis and foil for Gibson's Riggs.

The baddest of the bad guys is the menacing Gary Busey as the terrifically named Mr. Joshua. Also formerly in the military, he is in charge of removing any threats to the drug-running cartel, and soon this means eliminating Riggs and Murtaugh -- or going after the latter's family, which proves easier. The film does not shy away from a gritty side, with Mr. Joshua and his goons torturing Riggs, and a fairly vicious but unnecessary final martial arts duel between the two.

Lethal Weapon cannot fully escape the relatively narrow constraints of the genre, and creaks due to some shallowness in the secondary acting talent. But the movie mixes good action with a streak of mean humour, and maintains a reasonable pace that allows the stars to shine and safeguards against whiplash.

There is a smoothness and assuredness to the movie that comes from Gibson, Glover and Busey perfectly fitting into their characters, and Donner directing briskly and with an eye to respecting the characters and maximizing the advantage of having such a strong cast. Credit also to Shane Black, who, at 23 years of age, wrote a fearless script that created a franchise and consolidated Gibson's star status.

Lethal Weapon spawned three direct sequels and numerous imitators, and set the standard for cop buddy movies. It was often imitated, but rarely equaled or bettered.

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