The movie’s fine. All
aspects are played straight up without much flair, the performances are good
(especially Williams who gets impassioned at times), the plot’s always moving
forward at a nice pace and the action set pieces are pretty neat. The biggest by far is the part where Wulfgar
holds a group of people hostage, including several international diplomats, on
a Roosevelt Island tram car high above the East River. How’s Wulfgar gonna make his daring escape? How will DaSilva and Fox take the bastard
down?
Two things I don’t totally understand. Earlier in the film DaSilva and Fox chase
Wulfgar on foot and it goes on for a while across a bunch of blocks, through
underground construction and finally they wind up in a subway train. Wulfgar eventually gets away (spoiler) but after
this incident he detests DaSilva for some unknown reason. Fox was part of the chase too but Wulfgar doesn’t
seem to care as much about him. During
the Roosevelt Island tram episode Wulfgar asks for DaSilva personally to come
and remove a baby on board and while they’re face to face takes the opportunity
to rub DaSilva’s nose in the shitty situation.
On top of that Wulfgar then demands DaSilva drive the bus full of
hostages to the airport. This animosity
only for DaSilva comes out of nowhere.
Well the culprit points to some severe editing that took
place at the hands of Stallone and later the producers to make the focus more
on DaSilva and to tighten up the runtime.
That makes sense because the characters are fairly underdeveloped and
there isn’t much of a build up to the tram scene or Wulfgar’s seething hatred
toward DaSilva.
The other thing I don’t get is the title. DaSilva and Fox don’t work exclusively at
night and the word nighthawks is never used.
Whatever, sounds kinda cool I guess.
This won’t change your life or anything and isn’t all that
interesting in the larger context of Stallone’s career. He doesn’t write, direct or produce this
time. He’s simply an actor for hire. This is his first cop role (I believe) which
would become something he would revisit periodically throughout the years. Unlike some other action stars of his era who
seemed to play nothing but lawmen it would take Sly a good ten years before he
carried a badge.
One last item, there’s an awesome action connection here in
that this was directed by Bruce Malmuth who went on to make the Steven Seagal
classic Hard to Kill and the very fun Dolph Lundgren Olympics thriller Pentathlon.
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