Nighthawks (1981) Review
7/10
Two plainclothes officers work the streets in disguise, taking down muggers. In Europe, a man bombs a London department store and moves through three countries. The two things converge because somebody in an office decides they should.
The 7 is for a tight procedural with one extraordinary performance and a considerable amount of 1981 in it. The film is ninety-nine minutes, wastes very little, and has a real idea about the difference between policing and counter-terrorism. What it doesn’t have is an answer for Hauer. He’s the most interesting thing on screen from his first scene and the script keeps having to cut away to the people the film is nominally about. I enjoy this film a lot, and I spend most of it wishing it were about Hauer. Stallone is fine and the subway sequence is terrific, but every time the film leaves Wulfgar to check in on the cops, the air goes out of it for me. That imbalance is the reservation behind the 7.
Hauer Is the Film
Wulfgar is charming, multilingual, physically unremarkable and entirely without a political position the film ever states. That last absence is the best decision in the picture. He works for causes, plural, changes them, and the film presents him as a professional who has found a market and not as a believer. That was an unusual reading in 1981 and looks considerably sharper now.
Hauer plays him calmly, with a dry amusement. He’s never theatrical, never delivers a manifesto, and treats every operation as a job with logistics attached.
The apartment sequence is the clearest version of it. He rents a flat, establishes a cover, is pleasant to a neighbor, and the film treats it as a professional setting up an office and not as a predator establishing a lair.
I’d happily watch a whole film of Wulfgar renting flats and being polite to neighbors. The pleasantness is what scares me about him, because nothing in his manner changes when the job turns to killing.
This was his first English-language film and he doesn’t appear to be acting in a second language at any point. That’s the technical achievement underneath the performance.
The department store bombing is his introduction and the staging is cold. He places a device, leaves, and the film cuts to the aftermath without showing the detonation. That establishes a professional instead of a spectacle.
An antagonist with no stated cause is more frightening than one with a manifesto. A believer can be argued with and a professional can’t. The requirement is that the competence must be visible. Wulfgar is good at this, and the skill is the character.
The disguise work is also the character’s actual method instead of a set piece. He changes his appearance three times, each time for a practical reason, and the film treats it as tradecraft instead of as a reveal. Give him logistics instead of ideology. Documents, safe houses, transport and money are what a reader believes, and speeches are what they discount. If your antagonist is more interesting than your protagonist, that’s information. Either raise the protagonist or write the other book.
The Subway
The best sequence is a pursuit through a New York station and onto a train, and it works because of geography and because the film shot in real locations.
The staging is legible throughout. Platforms, stairs, the gap between cars, a hostage, and a shooter who has to account for a crowd, and the audience knows where everybody is at every moment. The cutting is also unusually patient for an action sequence of that period. Long takes on the platform, a held shot of a train arriving, and the film lets the audience watch Wulfgar decide something instead of telling them he’s decided it.
What makes it work is that the police aren’t good enough. Wulfgar has planned, they’re improvising, and the sequence ends with an outcome that’s a partial failure instead of a capture. The tram sequence in The Gray Man is the modern version of the same idea and this one is better, because the camera stays where a camera could be and the space is a space instead of a set.
The cable car sequence at the end is the other real set piece, and it’s almost as good. A confined space, a hostage, height, and a decision that has to be made before the car reaches the far tower. I’d put the subway chase ahead of it by a nose, but between the two of them I get more real tension than most modern action films give me in two hours.
Policing Versus Counter-Terrorism
The film’s real idea is a procedural one. Two street cops who are excellent at handling street crime are assigned to somebody operating under entirely different rules, and almost everything they know is inapplicable.
Nigel Davenport’s Hartman is the mechanism for that and the character is written well. He runs the training, states plainly that the normal rules don’t apply, and isn’t presented as a villain for saying so.
He’s also foreign, which the film uses. Hartman is British, has done this elsewhere, and brings a set of practices developed in places where the argument was settled years earlier, and the New York officers receive him as an imposition.
The training sequence is the film’s clearest material. Officers who have spent careers learning restraint are told that hesitation is the failure mode, and DaSilva can’t accept it, and the film doesn’t resolve who’s right.
The training sequence also has a look that dates it usefully. Slides, a lecture, a room of uniformed officers taking notes, and a British specialist explaining tactics developed elsewhere to men who have never encountered any of it.
Where the picture is of its period is that this was a live argument in 1981 and it hasn’t been settled since. The film asks whether policing can absorb counter-terrorism without becoming something else, and declines to answer.
Persis Khambatta plays Wulfgar’s associate and the part is thinner than it should be. Shakka has her own competence and her own reasons, both of which the film establishes and neither of which it develops, and she’s the clearest casualty of the running time.
Shakka is the loss I feel most in this film. The script gives her competence and reasons of her own, and I kept waiting for a scene that let her use them. It never comes, and every scene she’s in plays as a missed chance.
Put two competent characters in a situation where their competence is the wrong competence. That’s a stronger premise than incompetence and it’s available in almost any profession. The failure mode is making the new rules obviously wrong. Hartman isn’t a villain. That’s why the argument stays live.
A training sequence is the cheapest way to state a theme through action. Somebody being taught something they object to is an argument conducted physically. Leave the argument open when it’s open. A film that resolves a live political question has usually resolved it in favor of whoever was written more sympathetically.
Stallone in Between
This arrives between Rocky II and Rocky III, before First Blood, in the period where he was still being cast as an actor and not as a physique. The script writes DaSilva as somebody who’s good with people, uses a disguise well, has a failing marriage and a moral objection to what he’s being asked to do. Stallone plays all of that adequately, and Hauer outclasses him in every scene they share.
Lindsay Wagner has the marriage and about four scenes for it. That’s enough for the structure and not enough for the actor. The separation is established, the reason is left implicit, and the film uses her mostly as a vulnerability in the third act. That’s not entirely a criticism. The part requires an ordinary man being asked to do something outside his practice, and an ordinary performance next to an extraordinary one is structurally correct. Whether it’s intentional is another question.
Billy Dee Williams gets less and is better with it. Fox is the partner who accepts the new rules faster, and the friction between the two men is the film’s most economical writing.
Their argument about it happens in a car and lasts about ninety seconds. Fox says the job has changed, DaSilva says it hasn’t, neither of them raises their voice, and the film doesn’t return to the subject or resolve it anywhere.
Their opening sequence is the best introduction either character gets. DaSilva in drag as a decoy, Fox waiting, a mugger who takes the bait, and the whole partnership established through a piece of work neither of them comments on.
The Ending Works
The resolution requires DaSilva to do the thing he’s objected to for the whole film, and the film doesn’t soften it or reward him for it.
The final sequence involves a disguise, a hostage and a decision made in about two seconds, and the film cuts almost immediately afterward. There’s no speech, no colleague arriving to say it was necessary, and no scene of anybody recovering.
What the film does give is a reaction shot of about three seconds and then a cut to black. Three seconds is enough for the audience to take in what he’s become and not enough for him to arrange his face about it. That ending is smart. It leaves the judgment to me, and it’s the bravest choice in the picture.
That restraint is what the ending of Dark Blue doesn’t manage. A film about whether somebody will cross a line should end shortly after they cross it, before anybody has a chance to frame it.
What the last shot leaves is a man who has become the thing he was trained to become, and the film’s position on whether that’s a victory is that it’s stopped commenting.
The production history also shows in the result. This began as a different project entirely, changed director during shooting, and was reportedly reshaped considerably in the edit. That’s visible in how little connective material there’s between the set pieces and how abruptly some scenes arrive.
End shortly after the decision and before the interpretation. A character crossing a line and then being told what it meant has had the moment taken away from them. Cut on the act. The reader supplies the assessment and theirs will be more specific than yours.
Deny the consoling scene. No colleague, no justification, no aftermath, and the reader is left alone with it. A two-second decision at the end of a ninety-minute argument is the correct proportion. The debate takes the running time and the answer doesn’t.
Should you watch Nighthawks?
Yes, and for Hauer above all. It’s a great time: two street cops whose competence is the wrong competence, a subway sequence better than anything modern with ten times the budget, and an antagonist who works for causes plural and believes in none of them. It stops at a 7 for me because the film keeps cutting away from its best asset to spend time with men who can’t match him, and Stallone losing every scene to his villain is a real cost.
