by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/08/25 13:56 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/08/25/8770668856267197100.aspx
The 1988 film Shoot To Kill was freaking awesome, for lotsa reasons after I first saw it with someone I knew from The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia all those years ago:.
• Sidney Poitier back in the action buddy movie genre;
• Tom Berenger as mountain man who has to bring the FBI agent through the Pacific Northwest before the killer makes it to Canada;
• nobody knowing who the heck the actual killer is until halfway through the movie;
• intentionally padding the cast with known bad guys from other movies (one of whom is the bad guy this time!);
• Kirstie Alley being a sassy hostage for a big chunk of the movie;
• some really hilarious lines!
We forgive them the holes in the plot because of all of this and more, which is why it has a very rare perfect score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (the curious can look at the Roger Ebert review, which is also three stars!). Because we all loved the trip down memory lane of the older buddy movies and their buddy movie lines.
The most hilarious one IMHO (in my humble opinion) was from a scene where Tom Berenger falls while they try futilely to run from a bear and Sidney Poitier makes the bear retreat, confused:
Tom - I've never seen a bear run away like that in all my life .
Sidney - Everyone else out here acts like they've never seen a black man before; why should the bear be any different?
I've actually watched the movie with Greek, French, Hebrew, and other language subtitles just to see how the localizers/translators handled it!
Freaking awesome, like I said....