Tag: Kiefer Sutherland

Renegades (1989) review-optimal cable viewing

Media consumers of the streaming era will never truly know the pleasure of randomly flipping through cable channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon, which was one of the most reliable forms of entertainment for bored youth growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Sure, most of the television programs available during that weekend block were infomercials or reruns of ancient sitcoms, but every once in a while you would stumble upon a random action movie that would catch your attention.

Even if the film wasn’t very good, there was something captivating about getting thrown into the middle of a car chase or shootout without the ability to rewind, forcing you to fill in the gaps using your childish imagination.

These impromptu screenings would also serve as a nice bonding experience between you and your dad, who would reliably drop whatever he was doing at the sound of gunfire and explosions and sit down on the couch next to you.

It’s in this environment that movies like Jack Sholder’s Renegades (1989) really thrive, since you don’t need to engage with it at an emotional level and just get to enjoy the cheap spectacle before Sunday dinner is ready.

However, watching this film as an adult on DVD is an entirely different story, since its underlying hollowness is inescapable in this format and you don’t have mom’s famous shrimp pasta dish to help soften the blow.

Like so many action movies of the 1980s, Renegades can easily be slotted into the buddy-cop genre, with Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips starring as an undercover police officer and Native American tourist visiting Philadelphia, respectively.

When Sutherland’s involvement in a diamond heist results in a precious artefact being stolen from Phillips’ tribe, the pair must team up to bring down the bad guys.

From there, the plot unfolds in a pretty predictable fashion, since the two start out not trusting each other but gradually develop a bond as they get closer to cracking the case.

But unlike more famous buddy-cop movies from that era — like Lethal Weapon (1987) or 48 Hours (1982) — screenwriter David Rich doesn’t do a good job of giving these characters contrasting personalities.

Instead, both Sutherland and Phillips are written to be loose cannons who don’t abide by the rule of law when it comes to tracking down the people who have wronged them.

As a result, most of the conflict between these two is purely driven by the plot or superficial elements like their background, which isn’t very compelling.

It’s also pretty apparent that screenwriter David Rich was only interested in fleshing out one main character out of the two.

Sutherland’s undercover cop is at least given a decent backstory to explain his motivation throughout the story, since the audience is explicitly told that his father was a corrupt police officer who died in disgrace.

Meanwhile, Phillips’ character is completely shrouded in mystery, with details surrounding his upbringing only briefly hinted at through sparse bits of dialogue.

To compensate for this lack of depth, Rich takes the lazy route of imbuing Phillips with Jedi superpowers, hoping that viewers will be won over by his quick reflexes and ability to tap into “the force” whenever his family is in danger.  

But believe it or not, this one-note Hollywood depiction of the “noble savage” gets old pretty quickly, especially since Phillips’ chemistry with Sutherland is average at best.

Thankfully, Renegades at least delivers in the action department, with a handful of standout sequences that elevate it over the Steven Seagal-tier shlock that was circulating in the industry around that same time.

A car chase 20 minutes into the movie is honestly worth the price of admission alone, where Sutherland is forced to drive a getaway car at gunpoint after the aforementioned diamond heist goes horribly wrong.

Parts of this scene actually reminded me of the famous car chase from William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), where the director used a lot of first-person camera shots to create a palpable sense of danger.

The level of automotive destruction on display is also reminiscent of John Landis’ The Blue Brothers (1980), albeit with a less comedic touch.

The movie’s climactic night-time shootout at a horse ranch is similarly high on spectacle, since the filmmakers expertly compensate for a lack of natural light by setting the surroundings on fire.

And while the rest of the film’s action sequences aren’t up to that same high standard, they are at least well-edited and contain a lot of messy carnage that a more timid director would have shied away from.

Needless to say, these meaty chunks satiated my inner bloodlust and made me temporarily forget about the less desirable aspects of Renegades, like its cliched dialogue, generic music, and pedestrian plot that often veers off into being nonsensical.

But as soon as the action quiets down and you’re given some room to think, all these weaknesses bubble to the surface and the film falls apart.

Even the movie’s inciting incident is half-baked, since the main bad guy decides to take a breather from getting chased by the cops and steal Phillips’ family heirloom (a spear) for no reason.

Because of this, the protracted MacGuffin hunt that follows feels totally perfunctory, almost like the filmmakers were looking for the weakest excuse possible to link a couple of (admittedly cool) action sequences together.

Again, this kind of viewing experience is much better suited for the long-lost days of weekend cable TV, where you could put it on in the background as you wrestled with your brother or finished your homework before school on Monday.

But experiencing Renegades through the lens of an adult who is interested in obscure DVD collections, I can’t help but feel like something was lost in translation, almost like I was watching a foreign-language film with the subtitles turned off.

So unless I get my hands on a time machine, the optimal viewing conditions for this film are lost forever, and all I’m left with is a standard 80s cop movie that features good action but is severely lacking in emotional stakes.

Sounds like my last Tinder date.

Verdict:

5/10

Corner store companion:

McCain Pizza Pockets (because it’s the kind of food that also peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s)

Fun facts:

-Release date: June 2, 1989

-Budget: $16 million

-Box office: $20 million

-Because of Louis Diamond Phillips’ mixed heritage (Spanish-Filipino on his mother’s side and Scottish-Irish, Cherokee on his father’s side) he’s been able to portray a variety of ethnicities throughout his acting career, including Native American. Through preparing for Renegades, Phillips grew closer to the Indigenous community and was even adopted by an Oglala Lakota Sioux family in 1991. His Lakota name translates to “Star Keeper.”  

-Outside of helming Renegades, Jack Solder is probably best known for directing A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985).

-While Renegades is set in Philadelphia, it was mostly shot in and around Toronto.

-Sutherland and Phillips would later reunite in a two-episode run of the popular TV action drama 24. During this section of season one, Phillips plays the warden of a secret detention facility who encounters CTU agent Jack Bauer (Sutherland) investigating the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate.

-Musical highlight: “Only the Strong Survive” by Bryan Adams (plays over the end credits)

The Cowboy Way (1994) review-saddle up for some mediocrity

Despite what you might have heard, fish-out-of-water comedies are not easy to put together, especially when elements like class are involved.

Push too hard in one direction and you’re an elitist prick making fun of poor people. Go too far in the other direction and you come across as an uncultured swine whose worldview is severely limited.

But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood directors managed to take that potentially volatile formula and wring some genuine hits out of it, like Crocodile Dundee (1986) and City Slickers (1991).

While the plot of these movies vary, a lot of the same elements are always at play, where the filmmakers try to find some common ground between urban and rural communities, all the while playing the differences up for laughs.

Even though Gregg Champion’s The Cowboy Way (1994) checks a lot of those same boxes, it just didn’t resonate with audiences the same way, garnering poor box office returns and an even less impressive critical reception (currently holding a 21% on Rotten Tomatoes).

And after viewing it for the first time almost three decades later, it’s easy to see why this action-comedy isn’t fondly remembered by movie-goers, since the script never rises above the emotional maturity of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Kiefer Sutherland and Woody Harrelson star as the eponymous cowboys; two life-long friends and rodeo stars who travel from New Mexico to New York City to rescue their missing friend and his daughter.

Once the pair arrive in the Big Apple, they discover that their friend has gotten mixed up with some human traffickers who aren’t squeamish about tying up loose ends.

And just like the movie’s title suggests, Sutherland and Harrelson must use their rugged nature to save the day, even though they spend way more time fighting with each other than the bad guys.

That exhausting back-and-forth dynamic is part of why The Cowboy Way doesn’t work for me, since I didn’t really buy the central relationship between the two leads.

With very few exceptions, they spend the entire runtime of the movie at each other’s throats, arguing over everything from past misdeeds to how they should navigate the strange concrete jungle of New York.

Not only did this constant bickering get annoying after a while, but it seriously made me question why these two men have been friends their entire lives if they can’t stand one another.

I get that character-based conflict is the lifeblood of any good “buddy cop” movie, but in this case the filmmakers pushed it way too far and didn’t provide any real levity between the two until the very end of the movie.

Plus, establishing this level of hostility between Harrelson and Sutherland seems like a lazy way to manufacture conflict, especially since the duo are going up against a literal human trafficking ring.  

The script also fails when it comes to delivering on the fish-out-of-water comedy, since a lot of the jokes are entirely surface-level.

Admittedly, this “east meets west” premise had a lot of potential, since the push and pull of modernity and traditionalism is a classic American story that has already served as the foundation for a lot of memorable westerns.

But the best material that the writers of The Cowboy Way could come up with out of this set-up is on the same level as a struggling stand-up comic.

In other words, a lot of this film’s humour stems from simple cultural misunderstandings or Sutherland and Harrelson gawking at a bunch of New York City weirdos.

It’s not like this brand of comedy is automatically dead on arrival, but the parade of snooty waiters, quirky shopkeepers and high-fashion models on display all seem like cardboard cutouts.

The one exception to this trend is Ernie Hudson, who plays a NYPD Mounted Unit officer who helps the titular cowboys get a lay of the land.

Outside of acting like a real person for a change, Hudson’s horseback lawman also serves as a nice bridge between the urban-rural divide that dominates the movie on a thematic level.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers don’t seem interested in meaningfully exploring that idea beyond this one side character, opting instead for inane side-plots like when Harrelson accidently becomes the new face of Calvin Klein.

A lot of this could be forgiven if maybe the villains were at least interesting, but The Cowboy Way comes up short in that respect as well.

Dylan McDermott’s main bad guy is suitably menacing but lacks any sort of depth, while a talented actor like Luis Guzmán gets even less to do as a generic henchman.

These characters also represent the movie’s larger problem with tone, since the severity of their respective fates don’t line up with the filmmakers’ intentions.

For example, Guzmán’s character is subjected to genital mutilation in the later half of the movie when the “good guys” need to extract information from him using a baby cow.

While the acting and cinematography in this scene suggest a comedic tone, it’s hard to detach yourself from the unmistakably grizzly nature of what’s happening on screen.

Meanwhile, McDermott’s demise (SPOILERS) at the end of the film is gut-bustingly hilarious, even though I’m sure that’s not what the director was going for.

Here’s a free tip for any would-be directors out there: if you’re going to replace one of your actors with a dummy for a “serious” death scene, make sure you don’t linger on that shot for almost 10 whole seconds.

Despite all these glaring flaws, Harrelson and Sutherland still manage to keep the movie afloat through their sheer charisma alone.

The pair have natural chemistry despite being saddled with a poor script, and do come across as being believable modern cowboys instead of Hollywood actors playing dress-up.

It’s also refreshing to see Sutherland play a character who is way more calm and level-headed, although my praise may be a byproduct of me watching all nine seasons of 24.

But outside of these two appealing leads, The Cowboy Way never really capitalizes on its premise, with the fish-out-water element serving as window dressing and nothing more.

By the time the credits roll, all you really learn about being a cowboy is that you need to shoot first and ask questions later, which is how most 90s action heroes operate anyway.

If you’re looking for a more cerebral take on what it means to be a cowboy in the present day, you’d have better luck reading the novels of Cormac McCarthy or even watching modern professional wrestling.

Verdict:

5/10

Corner store companion:

Pull N’ Peel Twizzlers (because you can use it to fashion your own lasso … partner)

Fun facts:

-Release date: June 3, 1994

-Budget: $35 million (estimated)

-Box office: $20,280,016

-After finishing his work on The Cowboy Way, director Gregg Champion worked in television for the rest of his career, helming episodes for series like The Magnificent Seven (1998-2000) and made-for-TV movies like The Last Brickmaker in America (2001).

–Surprise cameo: Allison Janney briefly pops up midway through the film as a nameless NYPD computer operator who helps the main characters locate their missing friend.

–Musical highlight: “Good Guys Don’t Always Wear White” by Jon Bon Jovi (plays over the end credits)