After the pastoral interludes of The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, Walter Hill returns to the urban milieu of The Driver and The Warriors, but his decline since the latter pair continues nonetheless. One of the more obvious differences between them and the present work is the abandonment of an imaginary and imaginative urban world in preference for a relentlessly realistic one — if, by "realistic," nothing more is meant than a set of currently accepted conventions or mannerisms which include such things as the shot of Scotch in the morning coffee, the battered and rusted rattletrap of a car, the geysers of blood produced upon bullet-impact, and a system of human communication based almost wholly on rancor and rudeness. Thus, with regard to the last-cited convention, we get a script whose basic compositional unit is the spat; we get spats between boyfriend and girlfriend, spats between fellow law officers, spats between fellow lawbreakers, spats, of course, between law officers and law breakers — preferably, if not exclusively, phrased in profanities. The monotonousness of all this is perhaps not all that realistic after all. Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy, James Remar, Annette O'Toole. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd