Or, how about the scene early in the film where a fight breaks out on cue, and then stops immediately after a gunshot is fired? Bad handling of the extras here by the assistant director: Everybody in a bar doesn’t start or stop fighting at once. Even in the movies, there are always a few guys who delay before joining in, or want to land one last punch at the end. These barflies are as choreographed as dancing Cossacks.
The Jackal is played by Bruce Willis, as a skilled professional killer who hires a man to build him a remote-controlled precision gun mount. The man unwisely asks the kinds of questions that, in his business, are guaranteed to get you killed. Hint: If you should find yourself doing business with a man who wants to pay cash for a device to hold, move, and aim a rifle capable of firing 100 explosive rounds before the first one hits its target—hey, don’t go into a lot of speculation about what he may be planning to do with it.
On the Jackal’s trail is the deputy head of the FBI (Sidney Poitier), who enlists the help of an IRA terrorist (Richard Gere). The IRA man is a federal prisoner, released into Poitier’s custody to lead them to his lover, a Basque terrorist (Mathilda May), who knows what the Jackal looks like. The other major character is a Russian-born agent named Valentina (Diane Venora), whose character trait (singular) is that she lights a cigarette every time she is not already smoking one. I kept waiting for her to be killed, so that a last puff of smoke could drift from her dying lips as her fingers relaxed their grip on her lighter.
There was never a moment in The Jackal where I had the slightest confidence in the expertise of the characters. The Jackal strikes me as the kind of overachiever who, assigned to kill a mosquito, would purchase contraband insecticides from Iraq and bring them into the United States by hot-air balloon, distilling his drinking water from clouds and shooting birds for food.
Without giving away too much of the plot, I would like to register one dissent on the grounds of taste. There is a scene making a target out of a character clearly intended to be Hillary Clinton (hints: She is blonde, fiftyish, the wife of the president, and is dedicating the New Hope Children’s Hospital). The next time Bruce Willis or Richard Gere complains about the invasion of their privacy by the media, I hope someone remembers to ask them why their movie needed to show the first lady under fire.
Jaws the Revenge
(Directed by Joseph Sargent; starring Lorraine Gary, Michael Caine, Lance Guest; 1987)
Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one—a ripoff. And that’s a surprise, because the film is the fourth in a series that has served Universal Pictures long and well, and it stars Lorraine Gary, the wife of the studio’s chief executive officer. Wasn’t there someone in charge of assuring that the film was at least a passable thriller, however bad? I guess not.
The plot centers on the character of Ellen Brody, who, you may recall, was the wife of the Roy Scheider character in the first and second Jaws movies. Now she is a widow, and her son has his dad’s old job at the police department. The story opens at Christmas, as the son is eaten by a shark right off Martha’s Vineyard, while a children’s choir drowns out his screams with Christmas carols.
Mrs. Brody (Gary) flees in horror to the Bahamas, where her other son (Lance Guest) works as, you got it, a marine biologist. She pleads with him not to go into the water, but he argues that the great white shark has never been seen in warm waters. Not long after, the shark is seen, having made the trip from Martha’s Vineyard to the Bahamas in three days.
Mrs. Brody, meanwhile, falls in love with a local pilot (Michael Caine), and there is a subplot about how her son is jealous of this new man in his mother’s life. This jealousy, like every other plot device in the movie, is left unresolved at the end, but so what? The screenplay is simply a series of meaningless episodes of human behavior, punctuated by shark attacks.
Since we see so much of the shark in the movie, you’d think they would have built some good ones. They’ve had three earlier pictures for practice. But in some scenes the shark’s skin looks like canvas with acne, and in others all we see is an obviously fake shark head with lots of teeth. The shark models have so little movement that at times they seem to be supporting themselves on boats, instead of attacking them. Up until the ludicrous final sequence of the movie, the scariest creature in the film is an eel.
What happens at the end? Ellen Brody has become convinced that the shark is following her. It wants revenge against her entire family. Her friends pooh-pooh the notion that a shark could identify, follow, or even care about one individual human being, but I am willing to grant the point, for the benefit of the plot.
I believe that the shark wants revenge against Mrs. Brody. I do. I really do believe it. After all, her husband was one of the men who hunted this shark and killed it, blowing it to bits. And what shark wouldn’t want revenge against the survivors of the men who killed it?
Here are some things, however, that I do not believe:
• That Mrs. Brody could be haunted by flashbacks to events where she was not present and that, in some cases, no survivors witnessed.
• That the movie would give us one shark attack as a dream sequence, have the hero wake up in a sweat, then give us a second shark attack, and then cut to the hero awake in bed, giving us the only thing worse than the old “it’s only a dream” routine, which is the old “is it a dream or not?” routine.
• That Mrs. Brody would commandeer a boat and sail out alone into the ocean to sacrifice herself to the shark, so that the killing could end. That Caine’s character could or would crash-land his airplane at sea so that he and two other men could swim to Mrs. Brody’s rescue.
• That after being trapped in a sinking airplane by the shark and disappearing under the water, Caine could survive the attack, swim to the boat, and climb on board—not only completely unhurt but wearing a shirt and pants that are not even wet.
• That the shark would stand on its tail in the water long enough for the boat to ram it.
• That the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence.
There is one other thing I can’t believe about Jaws the Revenge, and that is that on March 30, 1987, Michael Caine passed up his chance to accept his Academy Award in person because of his commitment to this movie. Why? Well, as the marine biologist in the movie explains, if you don’t go right back in the water after something terrible happens to you, you might be too afraid to ever go back in again. Maybe Caine was thinking that if he ever left the set, he could never bring himself to return.
The Jazz Singer
(Directed by Richard Fleischer; starring Neil Diamond, Lucie Arnaz, Laurence Olivier; 1980)
The Jazz Singer has so many things wrong with it that a review threatens to become a list. Let me start with the most obvious: This movie is about a man who is at least twenty years too old for such things to be happening to him. The Jazz Singer looks ridiculous giving us Neil Diamond going through an adolescent crisis.
The movie is a remake, of course, of Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer, which was the first commercially successful talking picture. The remake has played with time in an interesting way: It sets the story in the present, but it places the characters in some kind of time warp. Their behavior seems decades out of date, and some scenes are totally inexplicable in any context.