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No Way Out (1987)
Directed by: Roger Donaldson
Starring: Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Will Patton

Synopsis: Navy Lt. Tom Farrell meets a young woman, Susan Atwell, and they share a passionate fling. Farrell then finds out that his superior, Defense Secretary David Brice, is also romantically involved with Atwell. When the young woman turns up dead, Farrell is put in charge of the murder investigation. He begins to uncover shocking clues about the case, but when details of his encounter with Susan surface, he becomes a suspect as well.

Rating: 8/10

My little experiment to get more readers was a total bust. Turns out I’m terrible at posting regularly. I just don’t have it in me to be that guy, and the little extra I did post saw no improvement in my numbers.

Maybe they would if I pushed a little harder and did it for a little longer. I don’t know. I don’t really care. I’ll spend some more time thinking about what comes next. It seems logical to do more reviewing on Letterboxed or writing for Cinema Sentries, as that would definitely get me more eyeballs. But I love this little site, and it is hard to let that go. So, I’m gonna write when I want to write, post when I want to post. If people read it, great, and if not, well, that’s their loss.

Based on the novel The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing (which was also the basis of a pretty terrific little film noir of the same name made in 1948), No Way Out turns it into a political thriller with some neo-noir/erotic thriller tendencies.

Kevin Costner and Sean Young’s scenes together are steamy and playful, and you think the film is going to go one way, and then it goes another. Once she is out of the picture, it turns from its noir background to more of a straightforward thriller. There are a surprising number of scenes of just Costner walking angrily about the Pentagon, trying to keep everyone from knowing that the man they are looking for is actually him. And it totally works.

Hackman’s character has a lot more nuance than these things usually allow, making Will Patton’s lackey to Hackman’s Secretary of Defense character the true villain.

There are a couple of good chase scenes, and a lot of ridiculous techno nonsense (a large part of the plot revolves around them taking a nearly destroyed Polaroid photo negative and using computers to slowly render it into a readable image). The actors are all good, and I found it quite thrilling.

waterworld

This film had a notoriously troubled production and was, at that time the most expensive film ever made. I still remember newscasts breathlessly talking about production delays and cost overruns. It became one of the more famous cinematic bombs.

The story is actually pretty cool – the polar ice caps have melted covering all the land with water, creating an apocalyptic world where everyone survives on boats and you have to barter for everything. It is like Mad Max, but on water instead of the desert.

The sets and effects are all practically done, and I love that. They built a huge floating atoll and shot it on the ocean just off of Hawaii. The world-building is very cool.

The script is bad. It is filled with a lot of cheesy gags and ridiculousness. Kevin Costner is half-fish for some reason. Dennis Hopper, as the villain, is way over the top and just awful. The direction is sloppy. I kept thinking if it had been directed by George Miller it would have been a stone-cold classic. As it is, it is marginally worth watching, but just barely. I watched the studio cut which runs just over 2 hours. There is an extended cut that lasts over three. Maybe that one is better, but I can’t imagine sitting through it.