Disturbing opening scene, with a most uncharming display of machismo, male chauvinism, and downright drunken meanness from Burt Reynolds (who is he, after all, to make jokes about anyone's toupee?) — but all this is undercut by the "explanatory" scene to follow. A very nervous-making scene, later on, with the unarmed Reynolds asking for trouble from a pretty-boy gangster and two towering torpedos — but this is undercut, too, by the oddly edited freeze-frame fight scene that eventuates. And an interesting lesson in self-defense, still later, taught by Reynolds to the timorous Bostonian who has purchased his services as a Las Vegas "chaperon" (read bodyguard) — and this last scene is not undercut, but actually built upon. The whole, however, is somehow unshaped and unpolished, and the color at times appears to be decomposing before our eyes, as though it had been printed on desert sand at the first stirrings of a windstorm. The lack of quality control possibly has something to do with the fact that director R.M. (formerly Dick) Richards (formerly a good director) was removed during production. Or possibly that was why he was removed during production. Peter MacNicol, Karen Young, Howard Hesseman, Diana Scarwid. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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