Awful

Alan Smithee (i.e. the late Dennis Hopper) must have been walking with a permanent limp after firing this particular bullet into his foot. The quality of shooting was mediocre at best, the dialogue was poor and heavily clichéd. The acting was like watching a group of people, some of them olympic class swimmers, trying to tread water with a sinking battleship tied to their feet. Joe Pesci and Charlie Sheen are missing from the credits, perhaps because they insisted on it. John Turturro has since, thankfully, shown great skill (Quiz Show) but in this he must have been sleepwalking. Jodie Foster was ever pleasant to look at but even her talent couldn't bring the stillborn dialogue and maimed story to life. Hopper's ludicrous accent was at least funny. Vincent Price sat under a fancy hat and greatcoat in a stretch limo and looked suitably glum.

Stockholm syndrome could not account for Anne's (Foster) sudden change of heart toward her captor. Empathy may develop but most people don't feel moved enough by it to start looking for the bedroom. A professional hit-man would never allow him/herself to fall in love with a target, unless they were already thinking of getting out of the game though perhaps that was the point. The final section of the movie, the escape from the mob in a helicopter had me looking at my watch but to be honest I'd been doing that from about ten minutes in. If you find any of it believable there may be a brat of a movielet somewhere within but this version was worthy of going straight to Betamax and thence to the bin.

I'm wondering if qaaludes were involved somewhere. For example Easy Rider was not great because of what it was but because of what it represented and how it resonated with counterculture people at the time. Mr. Hopper probably lived a lot from the fat of that. His best role remains as the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now and that was because he wasn't really acting; everybody was stoned.