Word: walter
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...short, a grownup is a creature very much resembling Walter Lloyd (Gene Hackman), whose patient efforts to gain the respect of his son Chris (Matt Dillon) elicit nothing more than a succession of shrugs and silences. What can Dad possibly know about the soul of a lad who wants to be a race-car driver...
More than anyone might suspect, as it turns out, when Mrs. Lloyd (Gayle Hunnicutt), vacationing in Europe, is abducted, and father and son set out to rescue her. For Walter once led a secret life as a CIA agent, and the kidnaping of his wife is an act of belated (and misdirected) revenge for an operation that cost the lives of a Communist master-spy's family two decades earlier. The Lloyds have not reclaimed their luggage at the Paris airport before Walter is forced to dispatch a thug sent to murder him. In a matter of hours...
...Watching Walter Lloyd conduct a high-speed car chase or evade pursuers by diving off a bridge into the icy waters of Hamburg harbor is, if you are a gentleman of a certain age, roughly equivalent to watching Phil Niekro win his 300th game. It extends the effective life of one's youthful fantasies a few minutes more. But while stimulating that harmless activity, Target also encourages a modest re-examination of the ideological scaffolding on which the older generation erected some of its dreamwork...
Inevitably, Walter's return to the scenes of old cold war crimes evokes the mood and manner of '60s pop spy epics like, say, The Ipcress File. But Director Penn, whose most successful works in that period were counterculture icons like Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, is not about to be nostalgic about his former competition. Target is a deadpan satire on the old cloak-and-dagger conventions almost to the end, at which point Penn cannot resist staging with self-conscious luridness a scene in which Walter must deal with a particularly sadistic bomb threat...
Just who was this man, and where did he get off telling South Africa's Ambassador how his country should be run? No matter. Randall Robinson, 6 ft. 5 in. of polished brass, kept boring in. Accompanied by several civil rights advocates, including District of Columbia Delegate Walter Fauntroy, Robinson went to the South African embassy on Massachusetts Street in Washington and demanded of then Ambassador Bernardus Fourie that the Pretoria government release its political prisoners and extend civil rights to blacks. Fourie demanded that his visitors leave, but Robinson and the others refused. Arrested, they spent the night...