Nighthawks

So Nighthawks, it’s a 1981 gritty urban cop drama very much in the 70’s pseudo-documentary style that pictures like The French Connection and The Seven-Ups made popular.  Terrorist Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer (Blind Fury)) is on the run after bombing a London department store and comes to NYC.  But instead of hiding out he continues to wreak havoc.  Meanwhile cops Deke DaSilva (Stallone) and Matthew Fox (Billy Dee Williams (Batman (1989))) are recruited to be part of an anti-terrorist unit within the police department specifically to track down Wulfgar.

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.