Nighthawks (1981) Review

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 genuine idea about the difference between policing and counter-terrorism.

What it does not have is an answer for Hauer. He is 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.

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, which was an unusual reading in 1981 and looks considerably sharper now.

Hauer plays him quietly and with a specific kind of amusement. He is 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 the whole thing as a professional setting up an office and not as a predator establishing a lair.

This was his first English-language film and he does not appear to be acting in a second language at any point, which is 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, which establishes a professional instead of a spectacle.

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 has decided it.

What makes it land is that the police are not good enough. Wulfgar has planned, they are improvising, and the sequence ends with an outcome that is 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 is almost as good. A confined space, a hostage, height, and a decision that has to be made before the car reaches the far tower.

Policing Versus Counter-Terrorism

The film’s genuine 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 do not apply, and is not presented as a villain for saying so.

He is 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 cannot accept it, and the film does not resolve who is right.

The training sequence also has a specific texture 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 genuinely of its period is that this was a live argument in 1981 and it has not 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 is the clearest casualty of the running time.

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.

DaSilva is written as somebody who is good with people, uses a disguise well, has a failing marriage and a moral objection to what he is being asked to do. Stallone plays all of that adequately and is outclassed in every scene with Hauer.

Lindsay Wagner has the marriage and about four scenes for it, which is 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 is 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 is 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 has not, neither of them raises their voice, and the film does not 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 has objected to for the whole film, and the film does not 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 is 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 register what he has become and not enough for him to arrange his face about it.

That restraint is what the ending of Dark Blue does not 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 is a victory is that it has 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 substantially in the edit, which is visible in how little connective material there is between the set pieces and how abruptly some scenes arrive.

Should you watch Nighthawks?

Yes, and for Hauer above all. A tight procedural about 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.

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