Extreme Prejudice

Who could have beer. more ready to love this picture than I? After all, it is an action thriller, directed by Walter Hill, starring Nick Nolte as a lone, tough Ranger battling high-tech mercenaries, and promising a lot of automatic weapons. Not only that, it has Powers Boothe, whem I also like, and Maria Conchita Alonso (or however the hell you spell it), as the woman the two men seemx to be battling for. Alas, no matter how much popcorn I ate, I couldn't make the picture live up to any of my expectatiens, which only goes to show that even with all the right ingredients, it is still possible to come out with something unpalatable. Nolte is stalwart and gaunt, but also utterly humorless. The direction by Hill is churning and thick--not the razor sharpness I’ve come to expect from him. The plot is sort of stupid and overblown, and the showdown between the Ranger and the mercenaries is sort of a lie; he catches two of them more or less by accident, and they wind up fighting more or less on the same dide.

There was a good idea in there, about how the old-fashioned lawman defeats the evil, high tech soldiers, but they completely waste it in favor of a lot of witless gunplay. Even the big, climactic showdown between Nolte and Boothe is trashed completely. None of the big moments ever materilaize, and we are left awash in a dreary sea of gunplay and glowering stares (and sweat--everybody sweats). For all its noise, the picture never develups any nerratlve impact, and you wind... well... bored. Too bad. Of all people, you'd think that Hill would recognize that it's not the size of the gunfire you have, it's how you use it.