![]() At one point he sneaks up on his girlfriend in a manner I think is supposed to be playful, but from the look on his face you half expect him to crush her skull in his hands. But that intensity also works against him in places. He’s game for whatever Sherman wants to throw at him, he’s believable doing the fighting and the stunt work, and he has at least one big emotional moment where Hauer directs all of his rage and despair inwardly and locks it in with his typical intensity. That’s not to say he’s terrible in this movie. Hauer is an actor from a completely different mold than his action movie contemporaries, but the film tries to fit him into this ‘generic action movie hero’ slot, and he just doesn’t fit. Of course we do, because we’ve seen our fair share of 80s action movies, and Wanted Dead or Alive does nothing to distinguish itself from the pack. We all know how that typically turns out, right? ![]() Just a few more jobs, and then he can quit. ![]() He wants to save up some money so he can fix up his old boat and sail away into sunnier climes. He’s a former CIA agent, who now works catching bad guys for profit. He works out of the ultimate ‘man-cave,’ a converted Ford assembly plant where he keeps his guns, work-out equipment, stereo and microwave, and he lives on an old boat, where he keeps his girlfriend (played by Thirtysomething‘s Mel Harris). Randall is indeed “a loner, a legend, and a Bounty Hunter,” but what he’s not is interesting. What they ended up with is just another generic 1980’s action thriller. Nobody mentions where or when the original draft was set, but the producer and director wanted to make a movie more in the vein of a “dark European thriller,” like Day of the Jackal, I suppose. Sherman and Taggert move the action up to modern-day (well, modern for the mid-1980s, at least) Los Angeles. Sherman and his writing partner, Brian Taggert, had to do a page-one rewrite on it - and thanks to a looming director’s strike, they only had two weeks in which to do it. By his and Sherman’s account (they share an audio commentary on the disc), that draft was terrible. Sarkassian apparently had never heard of the phrase caveat emptor, however. Sarkassian bought the original draft of this movie’s screenplay (written by Michael Patrick Goodman) based solely on the title alone. Director Gary Sherman states in the interview that accompanies the movie on Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray disk that producer Arthur M. Rutger Hauer plays Nick Randall, who is, the tagline of the movie tells us, “a loner, a legend, a Bounty Hunter.” He also happens to be the great-grandson (or is it great-great-grandson? I lost count of the greats.) of the character Steve McQueen played in the TV series of the same name that aired in the late 1950s. Wanted Dead or Alive is an action film from 1986, and it’s just such a movie. It’s just sort of… meh, and I have to fill up several paragraphs writing about it. The ones where the movie in question isn’t good, but isn’t bad enough to be interesting.
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