I found this on Netflix's Watch Instantly feature, and figured I'd give it a go because I wanted to get another Hauer flick up. I didn't have great expectations for this, and often my instincts are right.
Wilder has Pam Grier as a detective investigating a murder, and her prime suspect is an Ob-Gyn played by Rutger Hauer. But if Hauer was really the baddie, then the movie would be over in twenty minutes, and we still had another hour or so left, so things weren't as they seemed. Turns out more women are being murdered, and they all had sicknesses stemming from radiation poisoning that would've killed them anyway. Now Grier realizes she's up against it, as the DA looks like he's in on whatever fix there is, and all signs point to a pharmaceutical firm trying to cover it's ass. To make matters worse, Hauser's flirting with her, and she's starting to fall for him, even though he's still the prime suspect to everyone else.
This was Lifetime Movie Network at it's finest, and I can't figure out how they got Hauer and Grier to play their parts. This needed Meredith Baxter-Birney and Bruce Boxleitner. Or maybe Victoria Rowell and Gerald McRaney. The actors just didn't fit here. They had too much edge for a Lifetime drama. On the other hand, their being out of place was the only thing that made it interesting, as it was pretty much just a Lifetime Movie Network throwaway pic.
Rutger Hauer was funny. He wasn't a baddie, which was cool. I got a kick out of watching him flirt with Grier. I think it does get old seeing him be a bad guy all the time, and it wasn't like we never saw him here, he was one of the stars, so there was no Hauer bait-and-switch. All-in-all, I can't complain about him, it was just that the movie sucked. I have a few in mind for the next film of his: Mentor, an indie flick that showed at Tribeca; Mirror Wars, a Russian airplane film with Armand Assante and Malcolm McDowell; or Bleeders.
One of the actors in this also starred in Punisher: War Zone. That wasn't a bad movie. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad, and interestingly enough, it only made $7 mill in the theater, so it's sorta kinda a possibility for inclusion. What was crazy was the sheer amount of ludicrous violence in it. In one scene the Punisher punches through a dude's face. Wow. Again, it was not the Lundgren Punisher, but what made this one better than the Travolta one was that it wasn't trying to replace the Lundgren one. They weren't saying the Lundgren one was bad, they were just doing their own thing.
So this is it. I'm out. I have nothing else for you. I just talked about pam Grier a few posts ago when she starred in the Busey hit No Tomorrow, so I won't tread over that territory again; and otherwise, the movie just didn't have anything else. It was a bad Lifetime movie, straight up. If you like that kind of thing, and I ain't mad atcha if you do, check LMN in your local listings. Otherwise it's not worth it, even for the Hauer factor.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246332/
But... since I have a paragraph, let me talk about another movie I just rented that came out last year and did pretty well: Wanted. That bastard was atrocious. I ain't lying. My roommate and I were trying to watch it, and at a few points we almost quit on it. First off, you can guess the whole thing almost from the beginning. Second, it was either really bloody or a bunch of CG special effects. Those were your options. It may have the biggest body count I've ever seen in a movie, in that a whole train full of people was sent plummeting into a ravine. Why would you do that? And it was the hero's fault it happened, and he didn't seem to care, and neither did anyone else. Just the same, the thing pulled in like over $130 million. This is why I almost never go to the movie theater anymore, because this is the crap they try to sell me, and it actually works with enough of the population that they can keep selling it. And the film had two Oscar winners in it in Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie. All I can say is this new Star Trek film and X-Men film better be good.
For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/
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