Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When his longtime partner on the force is killed, reckless U.S. Secret Service agent Richard Chance vows revenge, setting out to nab dangerous counterfeit artist Eric Masters.
William Friedkin's neo-noir thriller is a genuinely distinctive entry in the 1980s crime genre. The cinematography by Robby Müller is exceptional — sun-bleached, gritty Los Angeles rendered with an almost documentary rawness that few films of the era matched. The film's novelty is high: its moral ambiguity (the protagonist is barely distinguishable from the villain), its refusal of conventional heroism, and its shocking narrative subversions (including the mid-film killing of the apparent lead) make it singular. The ending in particular is audacious and genuinely unsettling, refusing Hollywood comfort. Acting is solid — Willem Dafoe is menacing and William Petersen committed — but neither reaches the level of the film's visual and structural ambitions. The plot, while propulsive, is somewhat conventional in its revenge-and-pursuit skeleton, elevated mainly by Friedkin's execution rather than the screenplay's ingenuity.