BLACK MOON RISING (1986)
Tagline: From the mind of John Carpenter comes the towering adventure that thunders across Los Angeles and explodes 30 stories above it!
(Action, Crime, I Can’t Drive…55) [R]
Fine. I'm just saying you gotta think these things through. You don't just come walking into someplace, waving a gun around, and expect the world to put up with that. It's not acceptable behavior.
In this one, a hardened sarcastic thief named Quint is hired by the FBI to steal information that will lead to the downfall of a criminal enterprise using a company as its front. Quint ends up getting very close to capture and decides to ditch the information in a prototype car called “Black Moon”. Unfortunately, before he can get back to the information to retrieve it, the car is stolen by Nina who heads up a group of thieves herself.
This is one of those movies that starts off with a pretty interesting beginning, that really doesn’t play into the rest of the film. We do get a scene where Nina is driving the car “Black Moon” around town with Quint chasing her, but there is very little of this car in the movie aside from 3 shot scenes. To me, it just seemed pretty odd that the film’s title highlights a car with so little screen time.
From what I have read this was a miserable film for Linda Hamilton (TERMINATOR) to make playing Nina because her co-star Tommy Lee Jones (MEN IN BLACK) who plays Quint was battling alcoholism at the time. The good news for the audience is that it’s really not that noticeable when it comes to the on-screen chemistry between the two. In spite of whatever issues were going on Jones actually does a great job in this movie when it comes to acting. I will say that somewhere in the 90s was when Jones’s career really started blowing up, but he had been acting since 1970.
When it comes to the pacing the movie actually does work and there is just enough action and intrigue to keep the story moving along. The film was in part written by famed director John Carpenter, but apparently, he never ended up seeing the finished film. I am not sure why. It’s actually quite a bit of fun. There are some kind of silly plot points, it doesn’t seem like a major company would need to steal cars to make a bunch of money, but what do I know.
Acting wise aside from the two leads we get Robert Vaughn as Ryland. He plays a great villain in nearly every flick I have seen with him in, with the exception of maybe 1958’s TEENAGE CAVEMAN. Bubba Smith (POLICE ACADEMY) gets a fairly small role but does a good job of bossing Quint around. We also get Richard Jaeckel (AIRPLANE II: THE SEQUEL) as Tyke and William Sanderson (PASTACOLYPSE) who both are always great additions to your cast.
Overall this is a bit of a “Grand Theft Auto” flick before its time with elements of both FAST AND THE FURIOUS and GONE IN 60 SECONDS, but it’s really Linda Hamilton crushing another strong female role and solid writing that made this more entertaining than the actual storyline which really doesn’t feature a major stunt until about the last 10 minutes.
BLACK MOON RISING is a solid 5 out of 7 for 80’s movie lovers, but if you are trying to press this up against more over-the-top car-based action flicks, I can also see a lot of people just giving it a 4 out of 7 on my scale.
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