Runtime: 103 minutes
Directed by: Peter Yates
Starring: William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Plummer, James Woods, Morgan Freeman
From: 20th Century Fox
For a movie with a decent premise and a cast full of famous faces, I do wish this would have been better. It was found from the same source on Vimeo that I described in my review of 1981’s Tattoo. Thankfully there was no issue with this “35mm restoration” done by the uploader. While you can’t legally stream it in the United States, it has always been easier to track down; heck, the Fox Movie Channel plays the movie once in a blue moon.
William Hurt plays a janitor who is infatuated w/ TV reporter Sigourney Weaver, despite her having Christopher Plummer as a beau. The Vietnamese boss who works at the building is murdered and Hurt is believed to be a suspect… while he believes his pal James Woods is a suspect, not because of Twitter behavior but rather because he has a motive and the viewer heard him utter racist language. He and Hurt fought in Vietnam and there are other characters who are prejudiced against the Vietnamese, for whatever that’s worth.
What blindsided me was discovering that Plummer’s character… was from Israel and he does activities to help his country. That sounds ominous now but to clarify, he helps rescue Jewish people from behind the Iron Curtain. I will NOT comment on Israel or what’s going on in the Middle East! Eventually, how those plot lines intersect is revealed. It is unfortunate the story wasn’t better realized and Body Heat is the much preferable (to me) 1981 neo-noir movie starring William Hurt.
Be that as it may, the movie is still watchable, was competently directed by Peter Yates and there was even Morgan Freeman as a pipe-smoking police Lieutenant who I wanted to see more of. A few different “that guy” or “that gal” actors appeared, like Steven Hill, Alice Drummond, Pamela Reed and Kenneth McMillan. This movie isn’t bad as long as you can accept Hurt playing a character that’s at times off-putting, a general low-key, low-energy vibe and something bad happening to a dog.
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