Director: Nicholas Meyer
Cast: Gene Hackman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Kurtwood Smith, Terry O’Quinn
Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s been like one of those desert mirages in the world of cinema. It appears on a streaming service every once in a while, and then disappears just as quickly. Only I after I practically tripped over it being included in a double feature DVD with No Way Out (1987) was I able to find it on some kind of physical media.
Did I Like It: I’m tempted to say no, as the great master Meyer himself is certainly down on the film. Hackman agreed to the film, and then turned up on location not wanting anything to do with the proceedings, but facing a lawsuit if he backed out at such a late phase of the proceedings.
But Hackman doesn’t feel like the problem. He seems present enough throughout the film, not one of his all-time-best film performances, but I wasn’t struck by him being completely out to lunch. Baryshnikov isn’t at his core a movie actor, and his character breezes through the film with a perpetually confused expression.
But the story—and it pains me rather greatly to admit it—may be the problem. It never really comes together. Maybe this is a byproduct of an editing process that had to work through a belligerent leading man’s performance to find some sequence of usable takes. Ultimately, though, I think Meyer still hadn’t worked out what he wanted to say about the end of the Cold War. For that, we’d have to wait—less than a year, incidentally—for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) to see his thoughts become more concrete.
I’m sure a studio executive in 1990 would have blanched at the notion that that the spy movie starring Popeye Doyle would be the less successful movie about the fall of the Berlin Wall than a fifth sequel starring a cast of TV actors nearly ready to start collecting Social Security, but here we are.