Walter Hill gets back to basics: your basic treasure hunt, your basic Mexican standoff, your basic moralizing and ironizing. Two Arkansas firemen, in the pursuit of their calling, come into possession of what appears to be a map to buried treasure, plus a yellowed news clipping that identifies said treasure as a cache of golden artifacts stolen from a church a half-century earlier while on loan from Greece. Gold ... Greece ... nothing more is needed to establish the story's mythic roots ("mythic" being academese for "basic"). The location of the hunt will be the fifth floor of a derelict factory in an East Saint Louis slum, and the timing of it will coincide unluckily with a bit of messy drug business on the rooftop. Amid an all-male cast with no dominant nor stellar figure — Bill Paxton and William Sadler as the Arkansans, Ice T and Ice Cube as contentious allies in the drug trade, Art Evans as a homeless squatter caught in the middle — the true star of the show proves to be the building itself, a piece of gutted architecture out of a nightmare ("When I was ten years old," says one of the treasure hunters in a burst of early enthusiasm, "I'd have thought this was the greatest place on earth"), with sufficiently plausible fortifications to prolong the deadlock between a heavily armed gang of drug dealers and two interlopers sharing a single handgun. The essentially static situation is stretched out to feature-length without either strain or sag. And for seekers of the "socially redeemed," there is a good deal of knowingness, though thankfully no audible commentating, about the abandonment of the contemporary inner city to the criminal (stopping just shy of the science-fictional extremes of Hill's The Warriors and Streets of Fire). (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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