A movie that probably owes its life to Jeffrey Dahmer. William Friedkin's cursory (and cheaply produced) mull-over of mass murder, the insanity defense, and capital punishment had sat on the shelf for four years (legal entanglements), until "interest" in the subject got reawakened. Back to beddy-bye now. With Michael Biehn, …
David-and-Goliath court-martial: David a divorced, drinking, limping, emotionally fragile ex-Marine, ranked sixty-seventh in his law class at Georgetown, now called upon to defend his old Vietnam buddy for opening fire on a crowd of protesters outside the American embassy in Yemen; and Goliath a State Department bad guy who, by …
William Friedkin's remake takes half an hour to get to the starting point of H-G Clouzot's Wages of Fear, and he takes advantage of that half-hour to accumulate a dozen corpses. (This early action looks good in the Coming Attractions trailer. Friedkin, it seems, will go to any lengths to …
The idea of a crime-fighter being as vicious, mean, and nasty as the criminals he fights is as old as the coinage of "hard-boiled." What perhaps has changed a little is the attitude towards him, the withholding of any assurance that such methods are justified by their ends (cf. Dirty …