Word: poitier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hollywood the black man's burden is to be all things to all people: stoic Sidney Poitier and sassy Eddie Murphy, angelic sitcom kid and fuming rapmaster. Lee's movie bravely tries both approaches. It gives you sweet, then rancid, but without explaining why it turned. He holds the film like a can of beer in a paper bag -- the cool sip of salvation on a blistering day -- until it is revealed as a Molotov cocktail...
Trashmaster John Waters goes PG with the bright, air- headed Hairspray. -- Sidney Poitier returns, cool as ever, in Shoot to Kill...
This reviewer won't ruin what little suspense there is in this movie by revealing whether Kirstie is taken hostage by the kidnapper, and whether this enrages her boyfriend Tom Berenger and causes him to join Poitier in tracking down the criminal, and whether the fugitive makes it over the border to Canada, and whether it turns out to really make any difference when he does, but suffice it to say that every plot twist is strikingly implausible and obviously invented only to justify the next improbable twist...
...hard to imagine how a fine set of actors like Poitier, Berenger, and Alley could read a script like Shoot to Kill's and still want to sign on--especially Poitier, who as a returnee to film after an absence of more than a decade ought to have chosen his debut project with a little more care. Sadly, the performances these three give do little to save the film...
Both Berenger and Poitier have screen presences which generate their power more from a natural dignity than from affability or audience sympathy--more like Nicholson than William Hurt, for example. But in a dog like Shoot to Kill, an actor needs to be liked more than respected; it's impossible to keep a regal bearing in a circus of fools. The writers seemed to have recognized this problem, but their attempts at humanizing humor fall far short. In one scene for example, Poitier and Berenger are confronted by a bear, do a "Yikes!" take, and run away. Not even...