Part 6 – The Watchable
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Watchable |
Part 7: The Failures
The best decision in this tier is Reservoir Dogs, and it was forced. Tarantino couldn’t afford to stage the robbery, so he set the film entirely before and after it. A heist picture became a chamber piece about who talked.
The other pattern is the protagonist nobody would defend. Travis Bickle, Jack Carter, Harry Callahan and Carlito Brigante are all men the film declines to endorse, and each is more durable for it.
This is my favorite tier to argue about, because every film in it has something I’d defend at a dinner table and something I’d concede the second somebody pushed back. None of these twenty are great.
I’d still take any of them over the polished, forgettable crime picture that disappears a week after release. A seven from me means I’ll happily give it the evening and I’ll have complaints by the end credits.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of seven parts.
This tier is where craft decisions start visibly failing, and the failures teach faster than the successes. Study them in the Awful Writing Handbook.
1. Ms. 45 (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ms. 45 (1981)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Thana never speaks and never explains herself, and the audience is denied the justification the genre normally supplies."
Abel Ferrara made it for sixty-two thousand dollars with Zoe Tamerlis, who was seventeen, playing a mute garment district seamstress who’s assaulted twice on the same day and starts shooting men in Manhattan. The film is ugly, cheap and considerably smarter than its reputation. Tamerlis was seventeen during the shoot and later wrote under the name Zoe Lund, co-writing Bad Lieutenant with Ferrara a decade afterward. She died at the age of thirty-seven, and this performance is the one she’s remembered for, a fact she disliked and said so about repeatedly in print.
The muteness is the whole design. Thana can’t report anything, can’t explain herself and can’t be talked down, so the film removes every mechanism by which the genre normally resolves this material. She has a gun and no voice and the picture runs eighty minutes on that.
Ferrara escalates the targets deliberately and the audience is meant to notice. The first men are attackers. The later ones are a photographer, a boyfriend on a date, a man in a park. By the Halloween party the film has stopped being a revenge picture and become something the audience has to account for.
The nun costume in the final sequence is the film announcing itself, and Ferrara shoots the party in slow motion with a wide lens so the whole room reads as grotesque. Thana isn’t vindicated and she’s not condemned, and the last line comes from a woman with a knife.
Ms. 45 disturbs me more than most films on this page, and I respect Ferrara for refusing to let the audience off the hook once Thana starts choosing the wrong men. My reservation is the cheapness. Sixty-two thousand dollars shows in every frame, and there are stretches where the film is marking time until the next shooting. It’s smarter than its reputation and still a hard eighty minutes to recommend to anyone who wants to enjoy themselves.
2. Nighthawks (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nighthawks (1981)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Rutger Hauer’s Wulfgar is polite, entirely unbothered and treats the killings as professional output."
Bruce Malmuth directed and Stallone spent the production fighting him for control, and the result is a film with a frightening villain and a lead performance nobody expected. Deke DaSilva is a decoy cop in drag in the first scene and a man who can’t pull the trigger in the last. Rutger Hauer’s Wulfgar is the reason the film survives. He’s charming, European, entirely without ideology despite claiming one, and Hauer plays him as somebody who enjoys the work. It’s his first American film and he’s better in it than the picture around him.
The tram sequence over the East River is the set piece and it holds up. A hostage situation suspended above water, a helicopter, and a police force with no useful options, and Malmuth shoots it with enough spatial clarity that the audience understands exactly why nobody can move.
4. Code of Silence (1985) [full review]
► Read the full review of Code of Silence (1985)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"Andrew Davis had made Chicago his subject and would go on to The Fugitive, and the city here is a functioning character."
Andrew Davis shot Chicago the way he’d shoot it again nine years later in The Fugitive, and gave Chuck Norris the only good film of his career. Eddie Cusack is a detective who reports a colleague for shooting a kid and is frozen out by the entire department.
The blue wall material is the actual subject and Davis takes it seriously. Cusack eats alone, gets no backup, and men he’s worked with for years tell him he made a choice. Norris plays it without any of the swagger the rest of his filmography is built on.
The Prowler robot is the ridiculous part and Davis knows it. An armored remote weapons platform the department has been testing, deployed in the final act because Cusack has nobody else. It’s absurd and it’s also the correct punchline for a film about a man with no colleagues.
The Night Slasher, Richie Madano and Screwface are three different strategies and only two of them hold. Build opposition that works in the Antagonist Handbook.
5. Cobra (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Cobra (1986)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"Stallone cut thirty minutes to secure a rating and the film runs eighty-seven minutes, giving it a strange propulsion."
Stallone rewrote Paula Gosling’s novel into eighty-seven minutes of almost pure attitude and cut roughly thirty minutes to secure an R rating. Marion Cobretti carries a customized Colt, cuts pizza with scissors, and delivers the line about being the cure in the first reel. The film opened against Top Gun in the summer of 1986 and took a hundred and sixty million dollars worldwide anyway.
The film has no interest in procedure, motive or plausibility. That clarity is worth something. The Night Slasher’s cult is never explained, the police department barely exists, and the last act is a chase through a California town that’s been evacuated for no stated reason.
Cannon and Warner Brothers wanted a fourth Rambo picture and got this instead, and Stallone shot it while separating from Brigitte Nielsen, who appears in it. The production was chaotic enough that the final cut removes most of the connective plotting between the set pieces.
Brian Thompson’s Night Slasher is unsettling despite having no dialogue worth quoting and no motive at all. He’s physically enormous, appears in doorways, and the film’s best decision is to never let him explain himself. The axe fight in the steel mill is staged with real weight.
I enjoy Cobra. It’s a loud, dumb film that knows exactly what it is, and eighty-seven minutes with no filler is a gift I wish more action pictures gave me.
The cost is that the story barely exists. The evacuated town and the unexplained cult are fine at full speed, and the second you think about any of it the story falls down.
6. A Shock to the System (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of A Shock to the System (1990)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Michael Caine narrates a series of murders in the register of a man describing a quarterly review."
Jan Egleson adapted Simon Brett and put Michael Caine in a black comedy about a corporate executive who’s passed over for promotion and discovers that murder is easier and more effective than any other available response. The film failed on release and is better than its reputation.
Caine narrates throughout in a tone of polite reasonableness that never breaks, even while describing electrocuting his wife. The performance is built on the joke that Graham Marshall regards all of it as good management: identify an obstacle, remove it, review the outcome. Caine has said he took the part because the script never once asked him to apologize for anything.
The corporate satire is sharper than the crime plot. Egleson films meetings, restructures and office politics with real contempt, and the argument underneath is that the skills that make Graham a competent murderer are the same ones the company promotes him for. Simon Brett wrote the novel in 1984 and the transposition from London to New York costs almost nothing.
7. Out for Justice (1991) [full review]
► Read the full review of Out for Justice (1991)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"Gino is from the neighborhood, knows everybody in it, and the investigation proceeds by walking into rooms and asking."
John Flynn directed and Steven Seagal produced, and it’s the only film in his catalog with a recognizable sense of place. Gino Felino is a Brooklyn detective hunting a childhood friend who has killed his partner in the street, and the entire film takes place over roughly one day in one neighborhood.
William Forsythe’s Richie Madano is the reason it works. He’s on cocaine for the full running time, killing people at random, and Forsythe plays him as pathetic instead of formidable. The film understands that a man in freefall is more frightening than a competent villain. The bar fight is the sequence that gets shown in clips and the choreography is good. Seagal’s aikido works better against a crowded room than it does in open space, and Flynn shoots it with enough coverage that the audience can see the joint locks working.
The neighborhood material gives the film its atmosphere. Everybody knows everybody, the Madano family are ashamed and protective at the same time, and Gino spends half the picture hearing from people he grew up with that they can’t help him. The puppy subplot is the strangest thing in nineties action cinema.
I’d hand this Seagal picture to someone who’s never sat through one, and Forsythe is the reason. A villain who’s falling apart in real time scares me more than any criminal mastermind, and Forsythe commits to the ugliness without asking for sympathy.
The puppy subplot baffles me. I can’t tell whether Flynn meant it as a joke, and I don’t think the film can tell either.
8. Bad Boys (1995, 2003, 2020, 2024) [full review]
► Read the full review of Bad Boys (1995, 2003, 2020, 2024)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"The first film is small and the second in 2003 is where the franchise loses its structure entirely."
Four films across twenty-nine years, and the arc is a useful lesson in what escalation costs. Michael Bay’s 1995 original is a comparatively small Miami cop film with two leads who spark, made for nineteen million dollars. Smith and Lawrence were both television comedians at the time and Don Simpson had wanted two other actors entirely.
Bad Boys II in 2003 is where the franchise breaks. Two and a half hours, a destroyed neighborhood, a morgue sequence, an invasion of Cuba, and no structure underneath any of it. The film is technically extraordinary and morally incoherent, and it made a great deal of money.
Bad Boys II is the entry that wastes the most, because Bay had two leads who could carry a film on banter alone and buried them under two and a half hours of wreckage. The money it made taught everyone the wrong lesson. The 2020 directors were right to go back to the two men in the car, since that pairing is the only reason I care about this franchise at all.
Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah took over for For Life in 2020 and did the smartest thing available and made the films about aging. Mike is shot in the first act and spends the movie recovering, and the comedy shifts from invulnerability to physical limitation.
Ride or Die in 2024 is the fourth and it holds, something almost no fourth entry manages. Smith and Lawrence have been doing this long enough that the partnership needs no setup, and the directors have worked out that the audience is there for the two of them arguing in a car.
9. The Corruptor (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Corruptor (1999)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"It is unusually interested in procedure, covering how the precinct actually operates and what favors are owed to whom."
James Foley put Chow Yun-fat in his second American film opposite Mark Wahlberg, as a Chinatown detective who has made an arrangement with a triad and a new partner who’s himself planted. The film is more interested in the arrangement than in the shooting.
Chow is the reason to watch. Nick Chen believes he’s holding the neighborhood together by managing the criminals in it, and the film neither endorses that nor dismisses it. The performance holds together an American film that doesn’t know what to do with him for long stretches. The action is competent and the film’s interest is elsewhere. Foley spends real time on the mechanics of the accommodation: who’s paid, what’s permitted, what gets investigated. The final act reverts to a genre shootout and loses most of what it had built.
Code of Silence isolates its lead socially instead of physically and never lets him leave the building. Work out where pressure lives in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. Romeo Must Die (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Romeo Must Die (2000)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"Jet Li’s choreography is genuinely good and the film keeps cutting it into fragments. That is the opposite of what it needed."
Andrzej Bartkowiak came out of cinematography and directed Jet Li’s first American lead, in a Shakespeare adaptation about Oakland waterfront property and two crime families. The Romeo and Juliet structure is loose enough that most viewers don’t notice it. Joel Silver produced and Aaliyah was twenty-one, in her first film role.
Li’s fight choreography is the product and the film keeps undermining it with visual effects. The x-ray bone-break shots were novel in 2000 and have aged terribly, and the wire work is used where Li didn’t need it. The football sequence and the fire hose fight are the two that hold up.
Aaliyah is good and the film has no idea what to do with her. Trish is written as capable and then given nothing to be capable at, and the studio’s decision to remove the romance the entire structure depends on left both leads acting around a hole.
It frustrates me to watch effects he didn’t need chop Jet Li up. The man could fight, and every x-ray insert is the film telling the audience not to trust what it’s seeing. The football sequence shows the picture it could’ve been. I enjoy it anyway, with a nagging sense that somebody in an office lost their nerve about the two leads and never got it back.
11. Sugar & Spice (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Sugar & Spice (2001)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.5/10
"A cheerleading squad robs a bank to support a pregnant teammate, told as testimony by somebody who despises them."
Francine McDougall directed a comedy about a high school cheerleading squad robbing a bank to fund a pregnancy, narrated by a rival cheerleader giving a deposition. It was dismissed on release and has been reassessed steadily since. New Line released it in January, where studios put comedies they’ve stopped believing in.
The deposition framing is the smartest thing in it. Somebody who despises Marley Shelton’s Diane describes her entirely, so every sympathetic moment arrives filtered through hostility, and the film gets its jokes from the gap between the account and what the audience sees.
The heist preparation is played completely straight against the tone. The squad watches Point Break and Reservoir Dogs for technique, builds a plan, drills it, and the film gives the mechanics the same seriousness a real caper would. That commitment is why the comedy works.
12. Four Brothers (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Four Brothers (2005)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"Singleton’s Detroit is the reason it works, with a specific neighborhood, a genuine winter and a family that reads as one."
John Singleton remade The Sons of Katie Elder as a Detroit revenge film about four adopted brothers, two Black and two white, returning for the funeral of the woman who raised them. The western structure is intact and the transposition works better than it should.
The brothers are the film and Singleton gives them a shorthand that plays as real. The hockey game on a frozen lot, the arguments about the house, the Thanksgiving flashback: the domestic material is stronger than the crime plot it’s attached to. Singleton shot in Hamilton, Ontario standing in for Detroit and the cold in the exteriors is real.
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Victor Sweet is written as a man who humiliates his own people for entertainment, a more interesting choice than menace would have been. The dinner table scene where he makes a subordinate sit on the floor tells the audience everything about the organization.
The street shootout in the snow is the best-staged sequence Singleton ever directed. Sightlines through parked cars, a neighborhood that empties, and a body count that includes a brother. The film loses its footing afterward and the final confrontation on the ice is weaker than what preceded it.
I’d watch the brothers argue about the house for another hour and skip the gang plot entirely. Singleton gave them a family that feels lived in, and that’s rare in a revenge picture. My complaint is the ice. After a snow shootout that good, the finale feels like a film that ran out of ideas and settled for a location.
13. Street Kings (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Street Kings (2008)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Ellroy shares the screenplay credit and the vice unit’s practices sit outside legal procedure with everybody’s knowledge."
David Ayer directed off a James Ellroy story and put Keanu Reeves in as an LAPD detective who plants evidence as routine and considers himself one of the good ones. The film is about a department where everyone is doing a version of this and the disagreements are about scale.
Reeves is better here than the reviews allowed. Tom Ludlow isn’t smart. That’s the point, and the film’s tension comes from a man running an investigation he lacks the equipment to complete while people who do steer him. Ayer had written Training Day seven years earlier and the department politics here are the same machine.
Forest Whitaker’s Wander is the best thing in it and the character is written as persuasive. He’s a philosophy about what policing requires, he delivers it in full, and the film lets it be coherent for most of the running time before turning it over.
14. The CSI Trilogy (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of The CSI Trilogy (2009)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Three episodes across three series connected by a single killer, an unusual structure for network television."
Three episodes across three series, aired as a connected arc in 2009, following a single killer from Miami to New York to Las Vegas. The crossover format was the franchise at the height of its reach and the writing is considerably better than the standard procedural week.
The arc works because each series handles the same case in its own tone. Miami is saturated and operatic, New York is cold and procedural, Las Vegas is methodical and quiet.
The same evidence reads differently depending on who is looking at it. CBS aired the three across a single week and the franchise was carrying seventy million viewers at the time.
The forensic detail across the three hours is the franchise doing what it was built to do. Trace evidence, blood spatter, a reconstructed sequence of events, and the satisfaction of watching a chain of physical facts close. It’s formula executed at the top of its ability.
Romeo Must Die lost its central relationship in the edit and left every scene aimed at nothing. Learn what’s essential in the Revisions Handbook.
15. Kill the Irishman (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of Kill the Irishman (2011)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"Danny Greene survived multiple car bombings in Cleveland in the 1970s, the documented fact the film is built on."
Jonathan Hensleigh adapted Rick Porrello’s book about Danny Greene, a Cleveland longshoreman turned union official turned racketeer who survived so many car bombs in the 1970s that the FBI credits the resulting chaos with breaking the Mafia’s grip in the city. Greene survived at least three separate attempts before the one in 1977 that killed him in a parking lot.
Ray Stevenson plays Greene as a man who believes his own Irish warrior mythology, and the film is smart enough to present that as both his engine and his problem. He doesn’t hide, he answers his door, and he keeps telling people where he lives.
The bombing sequence is what the film is for. Cleveland had thirty-six car bombs in one year and Hensleigh stages the escalation as a municipal condition instead of a series of attacks.
Cars explode in ordinary streets while people go to work. The FBI has publicly credited the resulting federal attention with dismantling the Cleveland family.
The supporting cast is deeper than the budget suggests. Christopher Walken, Val Kilmer, Vincent D’Onofrio and Paul Sorvino are all in it, and the film uses them economically. Nobody is doing more than the picture needs and Kilmer’s narrating detective is the weakest device in it.
Danny Greene is a gift of a subject, and I like that Hensleigh treats his swagger as the thing that’ll kill him. Stevenson sells the man completely. I’d have cut Kilmer’s narration without a second thought, because a story this strange doesn’t need a detective walking the audience through it.
16. Pain and Gain (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pain and Gain (2013)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Bay made a film about people whose stupidity is fatal and shoots it in exactly the register he shoots advertising."
Michael Bay made a film about the Sun Gym kidnappings and murders in 1990s Miami and shot it as a comedy, and the tonal decision has been argued about since. The events are real, the victims were real, and the film repeatedly puts a title card on screen reminding the audience of that.
Bay made the film for twenty-six million dollars in between two Transformers pictures, on the stated argument that he wanted to shoot something small for once in his career. The families of the victims objected publicly to the comic treatment before the release and again several times afterward.
Mark Wahlberg’s Daniel Lugo is written as a man who has confused self-improvement literature with a life plan, and the film’s sharpest material is the motivational vocabulary he uses to describe kidnapping. He’s a doer. He’s a vision. He’s not going to be a bystander in his own life.
The Rock is doing the best comic work of his career as Paul Doyle, a born-again ex-convict who can’t stay off cocaine and cries constantly. The scene in the drive-through with the severed hands is the exact point where the film’s comedy and its subject stop being compatible.
Bay’s instincts are the problem and also the reason the film has any argument at all. He shoots Miami as an advertisement, the bodies as slapstick, and the entire story as aspiration, and the result accidentally indicts the culture the crime came out of harder than a serious treatment would have.
I can’t make up my mind about this film, and I suspect that’s the correct response to it. The Rock is funnier than he’s ever been and Wahlberg’s self-help babble is the sharpest satire Bay has filmed.
Then the drive-through scene arrives and I stop laughing and start thinking about the families who objected before it came out. A film that makes me feel complicit for enjoying it deserves some credit, and it also deserves the six and a half.
17. Police Academy (1984-1994, all seven films) [full review]
► Read the full review of Police Academy (1984-1994, all seven films)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"Seven films across a decade, with the first an R-rated comedy and the rest progressively defanged into nothing."
Seven films between 1984 and 1994, and the decline is close to a straight line. Hugh Wilson’s original is an R-rated comedy about a mayoral order forcing a police academy to accept all applicants, and it’s meaner and funnier than anything that followed it.
Steve Guttenberg’s Mahoney holds the first four together and the character is a real comic creation, a man who has decided that being ejected is the goal and keeps accidentally succeeding. Guttenberg left after the fourth and the series never found a replacement shape. Guttenberg was twenty-five in the first film and the studio never replaced him with anybody who could hold a scene.
Michael Winslow’s sound effects work is the element that survives best and it’s entirely his own. No post-production, no sweetening, a man producing an entire soundtrack with his mouth on camera, and every film in the series stops to let him do it because there was nothing else to do.
The ratings drop from R to PG by the third film and the series is effectively over at that point. Mission to Moscow in 1994 is the seventh and it grossed under a hundred and thirty thousand dollars domestically, among the worst wide-release results on record.
The first film makes me laugh, and it has a mean streak I miss every time the sequels file it down. Winslow is the part of this series I’d defend without hesitation. After Guttenberg leaves I lose patience fast, because a franchise running on inertia with nobody left who can hold a scene is a sad thing to sit through.
18. Marked for Death (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Marked for Death (1990)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"The premise is the one Seagal used repeatedly, with a retired agent returning to a neighborhood that has a problem."
Dwight Little directed Seagal’s third film and gave it a Jamaican posse, a suburban Illinois setting and a unpleasant streak. John Hatcher retires from the DEA, goes home, and finds the neighborhood has a problem that follows him to his sister’s house. Seagal was three films into a career that would run for three decades and this is the last one anybody defends.
The film’s treatment of Jamaican culture is the worst thing about it and it’s not incidental. Screwface is written as a supernatural figure, the film imports a version of obeah as villain motivation, and the whole third act relocates to Jamaica for material the picture hasn’t earned.
The violence is the most creative in Seagal’s catalog. That’s the only real recommendation. The bar fight, the pool cue, the final confrontation with two bodies and one explanation. Little shoots the joint breaks close and holds them longer than is comfortable. Little had directed Halloween 4 two years earlier and the horror instincts show in the staging.
Cobra spends no page space on plausibility and moves faster than anything else from its decade. Learn what a genre owes in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
19. Natural Born Killers (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of Natural Born Killers (1994)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Stone shot on film, Super 8, video and animation, switching formats several times a minute for two hours."
Oliver Stone took a Tarantino script, rewrote most of it, and shot the result on thirty-five millimeter, sixteen millimeter, Super 8, video, animation and back projection, cutting between formats several times a minute. Tarantino took a story credit and disowned the film. Stone shot roughly two thousand separate setups and the edit took eleven months to assemble.
The argument is that media coverage manufactures the celebrity it claims to deplore, and Robert Downey Jr.’s tabloid presenter is the film’s clearest statement of it. The problem is that the film is doing the thing it’s criticizing at maximum volume for two hours.
The sitcom sequence with Rodney Dangerfield is the best-constructed thing in the picture and the most disturbing. Mallory’s childhood abuse played as a studio comedy with a laugh track, and Stone holds the conceit past the point of endurance. It’s the only place in the film where technique and subject align.
It generated a wave of copycat claims and a lawsuit that ran for years, backed by John Grisham after a friend was killed. The case was eventually dismissed and the argument about the film’s responsibility has never quite closed. Grisham backed the suit after a friend was killed in Mississippi and the case ran for six years before dismissal.
I respect the ambition and I find the film exhausting.
Stone had a real argument about media and celebrity, and then he shouted it at me for two hours in every film stock he could find. The sitcom sequence is the one place I’m fully with him. Everywhere else I’m watching a director so pleased with his own technique that he stopped noticing he’d become the thing he was attacking.
20. CSI: Miami / CSI: NY – The Henry Darius Crossover (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of CSI: Miami / CSI: NY – The Henry Darius Crossover (2005)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A convicted killer being flown from New York to Miami brings the plane down and walks away from the wreck."
A two-part crossover between CSI: Miami and CSI: NY, aired across two nights in 2005, following a killer who moves from Florida to New York mid-investigation. It was the first crossover in the franchise and it established the format the 2009 trilogy would expand. CBS aired the two halves on consecutive nights and promoted it as an event across both series.
The structural device is the handoff. Horatio Caine’s team develops the case, the suspect leaves the jurisdiction, and Mac Taylor’s team inherits an investigation already in progress with incomplete information. The second hour is a team catching up to what the audience already knows. Neither team ever meets, the smartest structural decision in the two hours.
The two shows have different tones and the crossover exposes it.
Miami is sunlit, stylized and delivered in one-liners. New York is grey, procedural and slower. Watching the same case pass between them is the most interesting thing either series did that season. The franchise was running three concurrent series at the time and this crossover established the shared universe.
Honorable Mentions: Crime Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in the conversation at this tier or above.
Night Moves (1975)
Arthur Penn put Gene Hackman in as a Los Angeles private detective hired to find a runaway and unable to see what’s in front of him for the whole film. The last shot is a boat going in circles with a wounded man aboard and no resolution anywhere.
52 Pick-Up (1986)
John Frankenheimer adapted Elmore Leonard with Roy Scheider as a businessman being blackmailed who decides to turn the three men against each other. The script is closer to Leonard than any other adaptation of the period.
The Hot Rock (1972)
Peter Yates adapted Donald Westlake with Redford and George Segal stealing the same diamond four separate times. The comedy comes from circumstance defeating professional competence, the Dortmunder formula working as designed.
Charley Varrick (1973)
Don Siegel put Walter Matthau in a small-town bank job that accidentally takes mob laundering money, and the film is a competent man working out how far ahead he needs to be. Joe Don Baker plays the enforcer as a salesman with a clipboard.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)
Michael Cimino’s first film, with Eastwood and Jeff Bridges robbing the same vault twice across fifteen years. Bridges was nominated for it and the ending is considerably bleaker than the marketing suggested.
Straight Time (1978)
Dustin Hoffman plays a career burglar pushed back into work by a parole officer with a grudge, and the film refuses to make either man sympathetic. The supermarket robbery is shot without any tension music at all.
Blue Collar (1978)
Paul Schrader directed Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto as Detroit auto workers who rob their own union and find something worse in the safe. It’s the angriest thing Schrader has made.
The Seven-Ups (1973)
Philip D’Antoni produced Bullitt and The French Connection and then directed this, giving it a car chase good enough to sit beside both. Roy Scheider leads a plainclothes unit and the film is otherwise ordinary.
Report to the Commissioner (1975)
Milton Katselas put Michael Moriarty in as a young detective who kills an undercover officer by accident and watches the department decide what the story will be. Richard Gere is in it for four minutes in his first credited role.
Deep Cover (1992)
Bill Duke put Laurence Fishburne undercover in a Los Angeles cocaine operation and let Jeff Goldblum play a lawyer enjoying the work far too much. The film is angrier about federal drug policy than anything else from the period.
Romeo Is Bleeding (1993)
Peter Medak gave Gary Oldman a corrupt detective and Lena Olin a contract killer who’s enjoying herself, and Olin is why anybody remembers it. The car sequence with her handcuffed in the back seat is the best thing in it.
One False Move (1992)
Carl Franklin followed three killers from Los Angeles to a small Arkansas town where a local sheriff is waiting, and the film turns on a connection the audience works out before either party does. Billy Bob Thornton co-wrote it.
Dishonorable Mentions: Crime Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. These sit below the floor of this tier and are named because the failures are instructive.
Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991)
Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee in a seventy-nine minute yakuza film that treats Japanese culture as set dressing and can’t decide whether it’s a comedy. The plot resolves in a sword fight nobody set up.
Wild Things (1998)
John McNaughton made Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and then this, with four consecutive twists during the closing credits because none of them could be fitted into the film. The construction is entirely reverse-engineered.
Renegades (1989)
Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips chase a stolen Lakota spear through Philadelphia in a film with no idea what it wants to be about. The cultural material is handled with no care whatever.
The Big Bounce (2004)
An Elmore Leonard adaptation that removed the plot. The cast is deep and relaxed to the point of inertia, the con is never explained, and the film ends as though somebody lost a reel.
Assassination of a High School President (2008)
A high school noir with Bruce Willis and Mischa Barton that was shelved for a year and dumped, and the reason is visible. The pastiche is competent and the film has no reason to exist beyond the pastiche.
Freelance (2023)
John Cena as a former operative escorting a journalist to a dictator interview, in an action comedy where neither tone is committed to. The coup resolves offscreen and the film explains it in dialogue afterward.
What Do You Think?
In this tier the ratings stop being about quality and start being about whether a film is worth the evening. Cobra at a 7 and Natural Born Killers at a 6 will read as backwards to most people, and the rewatch scale is doing something specific there. I’ll put on the film that respects my time over the one that lectures me any night of the week, and I think more people would admit the same if they were asked. Tell me which call you’d reverse.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Watchable |
Part 7: The Failures
