Best Seller (VHS)

I'm a big James Woods fan. His manic characters seem to play well with me. But for whatever reason, I had never seen this movie until this weekend.

The movie stars Woods as "Cleve," a former corporate hit man who helped executive David Madlock (Paul Shenar) found and then grow a company. The initial startup capital came from a robbery of a police depository that Cleve pulled off in 1972.

Fifteen years later, the sole surviving policeman of the robbery, Dennis Meechum (Brian Dennehy,) has written a successful novel on the robbery and is working somewhat unhappily as a detective. He hopes to write another book but can't come up with an idea.

Cleve meets with Meechum and offers his story as the next potential "best seller". The cop and the man who nearly killed him 15 years ago team up to put the bad guys away.

This movie is rated 'R' for plenty of profanity, a minute or so of nudity, and a fair bit of gun and knife violence.


Characters

Cleve -- is a typical spooky Woods character. As rotten as he's made out to be, you can't help but like him. A typical anti-hero, and a role that Woods has made a career out of. Cleve feels that he was cut out of the corporation without the respect he deserved, so he wants Meechum to write a book to bring Madlock down.

Meechum -- is a man conflicted. He doesn't really want to be a cop, but can't help acting that way. He waffles between wanting to kill Cleve, arrest him, or empathize with him.

Madlock -- something of a minor character, he comes off as rather ineffectual. Unlike other movies where they set up the ultimate bad guy so that you're cheering his demise by the end, Madlock is almost supplemental to the film.


Review

As an action flick, this is a bit disappointing. There are a few shootouts and fights, but most of the movie is Cleve and Meechum driving around, sorting things out. In the scenes with Woods running off shooting people, I was never too concerned that he wouldn't accomplish what he set out to do. Intentional or not, all of the evil henchmen of Madlock came off as incompetent boobs, hardly setting up a suspenseful film.

For the most part, this is a failed character study of Cleve. Although the questions as to why a farm boy would grow up to be a ruthless gun for hire are never answered, it's not for lack of asking. We gain great insight into Cleve's present sense of being, but with all the talk of his past, nothing ever comes out of it.

Woods does a typically excellent job of portraying a wild man who is a couple of cards short of a deck. I enjoyed the way that he played the character he was given. Admittedly, a good bit of that may well be the respect that I have for him in general.

Dennehy is a little less impressive. His character is too errant here -- one minute on one side of the law, the next on the other. It's one thing to make an impassioned speech about what's right and wrong before breaking the rules; quite another to skip the speech and just start acting irrationally.

The main problem with Meechum is that he clearly should have an agenda against Cleve -- he's the one who shot him and killed three fellow cops in the initial robbery. However, aside from a brief outburst once or twice, he seems fairly nonchalant about it. I suppose that he may be ignoring Cleve to concentrate on the real man behind it all, Madlock, but there's nothing to indicate that's the case. That he would turn his back on Cleve slitting throats or gunning people down just flies in the face of what he is supposed to be.

In short, while Woods' character is interesting, no one else is believable, and one would think that a film about a cop and a hit man going after an evil corporation would spend a lot more time on the take down.

Directed by Joe Flynn, who has made a career out of making low budget films, the movie has a film-noir atmosphere, and although so much time is spent talking and travelling around, there's not much interesting or exotic about the settings.


Conclusion

Overall, this was an interesting way to spend an hour and a half, but not something I'm going to go back to again. Woods is fantastic in a similar character in Cop and The Hard Way and I would definitely recommend those movies over this one.

If you don't like Woods, there's no reason to watch this movie, as everything else in it is peripheral to him.