A District Attorney is terrorized by the criminal he put away years ago when he was a cop. Rookie Los Angeles cop Nick Styles is at a Los Angeles street fair, where hit man Earl Talbot Blake pulls a double cross on some drug dealers, killing four men. Minutes later, Nick shoots Blake in the knee, and Blake is grabbed by Nick's partner and best friend Larry Doyle. Nick becomes the focus of the media, thanks to an amateur cameraman's footage of Nick disarming Blake. Over the next few years, Nick's career takes off: he's offered a job in the district attorney's office, and his hip media style keeps him in the public eye. Nick marries a woman named Alice and they go on to have two daughters named Lisa and Monica. While Blake is in prison, he vows revenge on Nick. When Blake comes up for parole, he orchestrates a bloody escape – which includes faking his own death. Blake doesn't want Nick dead. He just wants Nick to suffer in spades. He wants to ruin Nick's life as completely as possible, and then have Nick sent to prison for murder so Nick will know how Blake feels. Blake begins his vendetta by killing city councilman U. B. Farris and planting evidence to make everyone think Nick and Farris are running an underage pornography ring. Blake then kidnaps Nick, forces him to take drugs and have sex with a prostitute, videotapes the whole thing, and then releases Nick. Nick tells everyone that it was Blake who kidnapped him, but everyone refuses to believe Nick because everyone thinks Blake is dead. That night, Blake breaks into Nick's house, and makes a threatening videotape with Lisa, Monica, and an ax in it, but Blake didn't actually do anything to Lisa and Monica. Nick is then suspended from the DA's office, with everyone thinking that Nick is mentally ill because he keeps saying that Blake is still alive. Blake then begins the final phase of his vendetta – he kills Larry and frames Nick for it. Blake also links Nick to misappropriation of public funds, specifically, the funds he's supposed to be raising for a children's center in a building at the base of the Watts tower. Nick is forced to turn to his childhood friend, gang leader Odessa, for help in clearing his name and stopping Blake once and for all. Denzel Washington is a prosperous, respected, happily married DA. John Lithgow is a prisoner whom Washington sent up the river years ago. Lithgow and a friend escape, murdering everyone in their path. Lithgow fakes his own death. Everyone now believes him to be a harmless corpse, but ha ha, he moves around lithely in his ghostly world (where does he get his money?) and devotes himself to making Washington's life miserable. Not KILLING Washington, but ruining his life forever, a la Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck in "Cape Fear," only worse.<br/><br/>His frame-up of Washington is really devilishly skillful. He conks the unsuspecting DA on the head, take him to an empty swimming pool at an empty club, drugs him into near insensibility, and videotapes him having sex with some bimbo who, as it later turns out, is also giving him the clap.<br/><br/>Washington finally wakes up to find himself in rags amongst a community of homeless people. WELL! Nobody believes his story of course. They keep telling him things like, "Denzel – John Lithgow is dead." Blood work reveals both cocaine and heroin in his system of course. The investigating authorities also find a collection of planted kiddie porn in his possession. And the video tape of his sitting on a bed while some white gal does a cowboy on him turns up in the hands of the authorities too, with dialog altered so that Washington, instead of being half dead from drugs, appears to be saying, "You're going to do exactly what I tell you," and the babe answers, "Anything you say, dumpling," or something like that. The tape turns his wife off. The dose of clap doesn't help either.<br/><br/>You see, the problem is that no one believes him – not his bosses, not his family, nobody except his closest friend at the office, a short and pasty white guy who incarnates the concept of "impotence." Speaking of that, how did that hooker manage to give the sleeping drugged-out Washington a dose? Well, never mind. When Washington takes the legal authorities to the club with the empty swimming pool, he finds himself in one of those scenes where things have been changed around so that they seem perfectly normal. His colleagues make snotty remarks. The scene might have been lifted from a dozen other movies, maybe most famously "North by Northwest." Lithgow shoots the best friend and throws the pistol to Washington, who catches it in his bare hands so his fingerprints are all over it. All of this shows up in the most sensationalized fashion in the press. After the murder of his friend, Washington is suspended, though here, as elsewhere, the plot has a bit of a hole in it since nobody could possibly come up with a motive for Washington's killing the only friend he has.<br/><br/>Washington, harassed and hated by the law, driven half nuts by Lithgow, turns to the homies in the neighborhood where he grew up. They take care of his family and help him lure Lithgow to the Watts Towers where the dramatic finale takes place with the expectable dramatic results.<br/><br/>Here's another example of a stupid plot device. Just before the confrontation at the Towers, Washington has drawn all the media and the cops to a block where he is standing on the roof, doing nutty things like putting on makeup for the cameras, and threatening to blow himself up. All this appears on live TV and Lithgow, aghast at the prospect of losing the mouse he's been toying with, shows up at the scene. Someone taps him on the shoulder and tells him, "Mister Blake? Phone call for you." Lithgow seems puzzled at being recognized but goes to the phone anyway, where an anonymous caller tells him to go to the Watts Towers, without giving him any reason to do so. Lithgow, who has shown all sorts of brains until now, does exactly as he's asked. The holes? Lithgow would never have shown up at the scene in the first place. How could he possibly stop Washington from jumping off a fourteen-story building? Why would he risk revealing his existence in front of a horde of police and frenetic media? Two – instead of answering the phone, anyone with brains would deny being the dead Mr. Blake and walk away. Three – follow directions and go to the Watts Towers? Why? There is plenty of action for action fans. Cars do stunts. People get electrocuted and shot. Buildings explode. People live in a Biblical world of pure good and pure evil. If that's what you're looking for you'll find it here.<br/><br/>Washington should never have put himself into this movie though. He's a decent actor but absolutely NOBODY could bring off the several scenes in which he tries to explain the nature of the frame and instead sounds like a raving lunatic, stuttering out gibberish worthy of a schizophrenic's word salad. It's already been done to death. (Watch Jack Lemon try to explain why he's holding the nuclear power plant at gunpoint, while SWAT is banging on the locked door in "The China Syndrome".) There's another element that some might find unsettling too. In the end, you can only trust your own people. There are four classes of white people. The purely evil Lithgow, the dutiful but dumb legal colleagues who don't like him from the beginning, the good friend who is only there to be killed, and a collection of Nazi wannabees and the Aryan Brotherhood in prison.<br/><br/>The homies we meet are cynical but they believe Washington. They are street people but they protect his family, help him carry out his scam, prevent the police from ruining the revelatory climax, and they're clever as hell at what they do.<br/><br/>Want to see somebody get an electric shock atop the Watts Towers? Watch this. I give this a movie a high rating for many of the reasons people have given it a low rating. As one reviewer stated, it's way way WAy over the top! To me this is a plus to what would otherwise be a pretty boring movie. I found much of it to be hilarious. This movie does echo the whole Lethal Weapon, Die Hard vibe, and is basically the same plot as Cape Fear. But where those movies seemed somewhat plausible, at least as movies, this one goes off the rails. Denzel and Lithgow are watchable even in this ridiculous movie. Here are some highlights:<br/><br/>Spoiler Alert:<br/><br/>A gladiator fight between Lithgow and Jesse Ventura in prison using phone books as armor<br/><br/>A jockstrap with a holdout pistol holster<br/><br/>Lindsay Wagner salivating over a nude Denzel<br/><br/>A prison guard being killed with a circular saw<br/><br/>Ice T<br/><br/>Kevin Pollack doing Columbo and Captain Kirk impressions<br/><br/>A fight scene at the top of Watts Towers<br/><br/>An obligatory impaling of the antagonist<br/><br/>A bar with a heavyset topless woman and a midget (little person) walking on the bar serving drinks<br/><br/>And so much more as the dialog will make you cringe and laugh out loud. I honestly wasn't expecting the level of exploitative entertainment that was contained in this flick and liked in a so bad it's good way.
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295 weeks ago