The Action/Adventure Section — A regular column that will exclusively highlight and review action movies. The most likely suspects? Action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. But no era will be spurned. As the column grows, the intent will be to re-capture the whimsy of perusing the aisles of your local video store with only ragingly kick ass cover art to aide you in your quest for sweaty action glory. Here we will celebrate the beefy. This is a safe place where we still believe that one lone hero can save humanity by sheer force of will and generous steroid usage.
Gene Hackman is one of those actors who has never given a bad performance, or so people would have you believe.
Then again, it’s possible those people have never even seen Loose Cannons, so how could they have known?
Loose Cannons has the distinct dishonor of being the only bad performance Gene Hackman ever turned in, which depending on how you look at it is either a credit to the overall talent and dedication of a veteran actor; or an impressive feat of incompetence from a seasoned filmmaker.
Directed by Bob Clark, a filmmaker whose output got exponentially worse the further removed he was from Christmas movies, this is another in that most respected of genres, the buddy cop movie.
I actually have a weakness for buddy cop movies. In fact, it’s long been my dream to be the wisecracking sidekick in one, which is exactly the sort of thing that happens when you make your bucket list in 1992 and then stubbornly refuse to update it.
At any rate, since the movie is turning 25 this year, and there’s no one left to care, I might as well dig it up and bring it to the masses. Because really, this is exactly the sort of WTF experience that needs its own cult following.
Hackman plays MacArthur Stern, a Washington DC vice cop never seen without his burgundy satin Redskins jacket (remember, this was a time when that sort of thing would be a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame). He is reluctantly partnered with Ellis Fielding, a brilliant but troubled forensic analyst with multiple personality disorder. The unlikely duo find themselves in over their heads as they investigate a bizarre conspiracy that, when I actually break it down a few paragraphs from now, you will never in a million years believe I didn’t make up as a joke.
Ellis Fielding, by the way, has just been released from a monastery and is played by Dan Aykroyd.
I don’t know if that affects your feelings about the movie one way or the other, but I thought it was important that you know.
There’s no way around it: this movie is a mess. It’s some extremely broad comedy, mixed with some shockingly dark themes that no one seems to realize are as dark as they are. For instance, Fielding’s multiple personality disorder, the symptoms of which finds him doing bad celebrity impressions when he gets overly stressed? We learn that’s a side effect of him having been kidnapped and tortured for months on end by Colombian drug lords.
Which is a pretty heavy backstory to explain why a dude starts talking like Popeye…
And now at long last we come to the actual plot of the film, which is this: Gutterman (Dom DeLuise, The Silence Of The Hams), playing a sleazy porno merchant, comes across a reel of Nazi porn that includes, if I am understanding it right, Hitler in a gay orgy. Von Metz (Robert Prosy, Green Card), who is campaigning for chancellor of Germany and can be clearly seen in the film, wants it buried at all costs.
Later, they seem to forget about this and it becomes a snuff film of the would-be chancellor being specially chosen to help Hitler commit suicide by shooting him in the back of his kampf.
(Which… wait, is that how suicide works in Germany?)
Stern and Fielding must protect Gutterman from neo-Nazi hitmen, while trying to retrieve the snuff film and reveal the truth about Von Netz.
You know, as one does…
There’s all sorts of weird logic gaps like that in the movie. Hackman has a partner (an impossibly fresh faced David Alan Grier) who shows up for the opening scene and then disappears without a trace; A rivalry is set up between Stern and a cop named Weskit, who also vanishes from the story almost as soon as Fielding shows up; Ronny Cox plays an FBI agent who tries to take over the case, stands around for about ten minutes and then literally gets put on a train, never to be seen or heard from again.
It’s just an all-around sloppy piece of work.
But then again, Gene Hackman, Dom Deluise, and Dan Aykroyd run around shooting machine guns at neo Nazis. So at a certain point, actual quality becomes something of an irrelevant issue.
If not the most dynamic action scenes in the canon, the car chases, shootouts, and assorted bits of mayhem come at a rapid clip, so there’s never too much downtime. But the comedy aspect is ridiculously hit or miss. Mostly miss. To their credit, Aykroyd and Hackman have a decent chemistry. They play off each other surprisingly well in the moments where Aykroyd is allowed to be something close to an actual human being (he plays the neurotic weirdo parts way better than the wacky parts). But for the most part, Hackman can’t make heads or tails out of his bizarrely written character, and the jokes he’s given are so lousy it’s astounding he was able to get them out between all the dry heaving they must have induced.
Aykroyd is an underrated comic talent, but he’s all wrong for the part. Impressions are not his thing. They needed a Robin Williams for this sort of character. But that version probably would have been insufferable, so maybe we should count our blessings.
Regardless of his suitability for the part, you’ve got to admire the sheer weirdness of the impressions Aykroyd does here. Captain Kirk is an obvious one, but then there’s an old timey British boxer, Butch Cassidy (no, not Paul Newman; Butch Cassidy, for some reason), the Cowardly Lion, and in the movies purest moment of inspired insanity, the Roadrunner.
(Yes, THAT Roadrunner…)
Strangest of all is how in the last twenty minutes, the movie basically drops all pretext of being a comedy at all and just becomes a straightforward 80s thriller. The always fun Nancy Travis (So I Married An Axe Murderer) shows up as a Mossad agent also on the trail of the film, and there are kidnappings, helicopters, a shootout at Grand Central Station… but all of it done with Doctor Detroit and Pizza The Hut tagging along, blowing dudes away.
Look, I don’t know what else to tell you people: it’s just a weird as shit movie. People need to see it, if only so I have some proof that it actually exists.
Oh, wait. There is one more thing: there’s a scene in an S&M Club which basically shows that clearly nobody involved in the production had any idea what an S&M Club is.
This scene, combined with his appearance in Exit To Eden four years later leads me to one hastily formed conclusion:
I think Dan Aykroyd might like it rough, you guys…
Note: Instead of the usual trailer, I have included the (frankly awesome) song that plays over the end credits, as rendered by Katey Segal (Futurama; Sons Of Anarchy, and Dan Aykroyd (Loose Cannons). Do yourself a favor and take a listen, won’t you?:
