Clint Eastwood was always partial to a road movie - this is probably the among the least well known as it was made during that late 80s period when he was on the nose commercially, the public not really embracing anything he did, whether arty (White Hunter, Black Heart) or more obviously mainstream (The Rookie, The Dead Pool, this).
It's an odd kind of film, mostly made one guesses because Clint decided to ham it up. He plays a bounty hunter, which means he dons a variety of disguises - a redneck, a flamboyant promoter, a radio deejay - to catch his charges. It's kind of fun to see Clint having fun doing a feature film version of sketch comedy but if truth be told he's not that good - he doesn't have the broadest range in the world.
The female lead is played by Bernadette Peters, in "the Sondra Locke role" had not Clint and Locke broken up. She offers a different sort of presence to a normal Clint film - I wasn't entirely convinced of her chemistry with Clint, but maybe the role was undercooked. I certainly didn't think much of her mothering skills, she spent a lot of time apart from her baby even before the baby was abducted. So no breast feeding or cuddles? And the baby being abducted is stressful - maybe that's because I have a baby but I kept thinking "who is changing the nappy?", "who is feeding it?", "so no breast milk it's all formula?"
Frances Farmer plays her sister and always seems to be trying to get in shot. The white supremacist villains are a cartoonish threat, like the bikers in Every Which Way But Loose, the Clint movie I feel this tried to emulate, but that had a better support cast, country music, and a chimpanzee as well. It's super lightweight but there's no real reason for it to exist.
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