Striking Distance (1993)

Bruce Willis at the peak of his action hero form playing a cynical hard-boiled cop trying to fight the system. A pre-Sex and the City Sarah Jessica Parker at the peak of her cuteness. Great character actors like Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore, Brion James, John Mahoney, and Andre Braugher. Superb on location cinematography shot by Mac Ahlberg in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a cool genre score by Brad Fiedel (love that saxaphone love theme) and on the mark (and wonderfully over the top) direction by Rowdy Herington of Road House fame. Striking Distance is a nice little hard boiled action gem that seems to be slowly gaining a nice little cult following. For fans of 80's and 90's action films, this is a movie worth seeking out.

I was really surprised by the number of negative reviews of this movie. Granted, STRIKING DISTANCE, is not one of Bruce's best films, but I found it to be solidly entertaining, cliches and all. And I think it had some very good twists that I didn't see coming. I found the whole cast, (even (...)Sarah Jessica Parker) to be commendable in their roles. Special kudos to Robert Pastorelli, Dennis Farina and Tom Sizemore. I wanted to be entertained and STRIKING DISTANCE certainly filled the bill for me!!

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Bruce Willis is Pittsburgh cop Thomas Hardy, a former homicide detective who believes his cousin is in the center of the case he is investigating. When Hardy and his sexy new river patrol partner (Sarah Jessica Parker) discover a series of women floating dead in the Ohio River, Hardy begins to believe his cousin, an ex-police officer, is the serial killer, and the whole story goes back to his mysterious family past... Directed by Rowdy Herrington. Pretty good movie, but Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and other movies like that beat this. Worth seeing (!).

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There are two mysteries to "Striking Distance" (1993) which drive this movie and provide the character motivation; as things build toward a climax (and only ten minutes remain to wrap everything up) you know that two has to be one-that the same thing will be the answer to both questions because not enough time remains to untangle two "different" sets of misdirection.

Of course first-time viewers applying first-class logical reasoning skills will never guess the answer, because someone (presumably the writers) cheats at the end and introduces the deus ex machina device. Dating back to Greek tragedy, deus ex machina is when an artificial character is suddenly introduced to untangle a hopelessly contrived plot. Looking back for clues to the involvement of this character you realize that there are none and that the writers have intentionally kept the audience ignorant, a cheap way to surprise the viewer, the drawback being that the technique makes it impossible to inject even the tiniest bit of suspense into the viewing process. What clues there are were inserted just to jerk the viewer around.

They cheat again with another of those stupid villain resurrection fight sequences at the very end. You know this tired stuff, show evidence that the villain could not possibly have escaped then have him Jason-like magically surface alive and kicking. The sad part being that it doesn't work (which must have been obvious during the editing process), it is totally unnecessary, and it could have been seamlessly trimmed out during post-production. Lose those moronic 20 seconds and you could add about 10 IQ points to the target audience.

That said, it is otherwise an entertaining film. Bruce Willis plays a trouble-making Pittsburgh cop named Hardy and.... big surprise.... he's unpopular with the department brass. He is demoted and paired with Sarah Jessica Parker patrolling the three rivers for the River Rescue Squad. Their romance is predictable but the chemistry is good and the relationship has a nice low-key charm. The river patrol provides an opportunity to stage some nice 1940's style action and chase scenes. Hardy is very easy to identify with so you can get a nice vicarious rush from his point-of-view.

Hardy is unpopular because he testified against his first partner in a police brutality case, because he insists that a serial killer is still at large, and that only someone on the force could be the serial killer. So mystery #1 is the identity of the serial killer. Mystery #2 is who killed Hardy's father (a police Captain) about the same time as the first round of serial killings. . His uncle (Dennis Farina) is on the force, and at one time so were two of his uncle's sons, Hardy's cousins and childhood friends. Not much is revealed about them because doing so would require a much more intelligent screenplay. One seems to be a violent nut case so you know he could not possibly be involved in the killings.

Roger Ebert summed it all up nicely in a template: "A rebel cop stirs up trouble and is disciplined, but determines to stay on the trail of a serial killer, while meanwhile he is assigned a partner that first he hates and then he likes, while the killer cleverly tries to frame him. Add several chase scenes and a deadly confrontation in which all of the key characters magically congregate at the same time."

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

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This is a great movie, there is nothing you can not like in this movie.

Bruce willis as well as the rest of the cast did a good job in this movie with very good acting, the plot is also entertaining with some twists in it, the whole thing about how all the family members of Bruce are cops is just cool, reminded me a little of cop land (town of cops), but this movie is even better than cop land.

Tom sizemore performance was also noticable, even Sarah jessica parker was good here.

currently, i only own a VHS copy of the movie, but if any one have not seen it yet, my advice is to buy the DVD because this movie is worth it and is FULLY ENTERTAINING !

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