Bovie Movie

Loose Cannons may be a wacky buddy-cop comedy, but it starts with a chilling premise. It seems that a film is discovered that depicts the final moments of Adolf Hitler’s life. The climax features young German officer Von Metz, who is seen putting Hitler to death. Von Metz (Robert Prosky) is now running for chancellor of West Germany. If this film gets out, his political career is finished, so Von Metz has arranged for the murder of anyone who has seen the film. The killings have taken place in the Washington area and Mac (Gene Hackman) and Ellis (Dan Aykroyd) are sent to investigate the crimes. Mac is a middle-aged veteran of the force, a professional who gets things done. But Ellis is a different ball of wax. Suffering from a multiple personality disorder, he has spent two years in a Benedictine monastery to recover from his problems. But he is far from cured — as Mac discovers, whenever Ellis is confronted by violence, he blacks out and begins to assume the characters of popular culture icons like Popeye, Captain Kirk, and the Road Runner.

The 1987 National Football League players’ strike inspired this sports-themed comedy. The Washington Sentinels are one of the strongest teams in pro football, and coach Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman) and quarterback Eddie Martel (Brett Cullen) look like they’re on the road to the Super Bowl — until contract negotiations break down and the Sentinels go on strike. Determined to play the team’s schedule, McGinty and owner Edward O’Neil (Jack Warden) recruit a ragtag band of scab players, headed by quarterback Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), a promising athlete until a catastrophic defeat dashed his confidence. Joining Falco on the team are Clifford Franklin (Orlando Jones), a receiver who can’t catch the ball; Nigel Gruff (Rhys Ifans), a chain-smoking Welsh soccer player; Bateman (Jon Favreau), a former cop with anger management problems; Fumiko (Ace Yonamine), a sumo wrestler new to football; and Wilkinson (Michael Jace), a convict on parole to the Sentinels. Can McGinty mold his new squad of misfits and no-hopers (who truly love the game) into a winning team? Brooke Langton plays Annabelle, head of the Sentinels’ cheerleading squad (who has to contend with replacements of her own), and football commentators John Madden and Pat Summerall appear as themselves.

A clumsy criminal is put in a position where he not only has to save his own skin, but that of his girlfriend in this comedy with strong undercurrents of romance. Jerry Welbach (Brad Pitt) is a low-level Mafia “mechanic” whose ineptitude is countered by frequent (but unpredictable) bursts of dumb luck. Jerry’s girlfriend Samantha (Julia Roberts) wants him to get out of the business, and after his latest blunder lands capo Arnold Margolese (Gene Hackman) in jail, so does mid-level crime kingpin Bernie Nayman (Bob Balaban). But Bernie insists that Jerry do one last errand for the mob before they let him find employment elsewhere — he has to go to Mexico and recover a rare and very valuable pistol, which is said to be cursed. While Samantha objects to Jerry taking the assignment, he isn’t in much of a position to argue; Jerry heads south of the border, while Samantha, in a huff, sets out for Las Vegas. Once in Mexico, Jerry finds the pistol easily enough, but making his way back to the States proves to be an unexpected challenge. Meanwhile, Jerry’s superiors want insurance that he’ll return with the goods, so they hire Leroy (James Gandolfini), a hitman, to kidnap Samantha and hold her hostage until Jerry comes back. However, Samantha and Leroy quickly strike up a friendship, and she soon learns the gunman has a sensitive side he doesn’t show to the world — along with a few other secrets. The Mexican marked the first screen pairing for mega-stars Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt — though, given the film’s narrative arc, they play only a handful of scenes together. The film was directed by Gore Verbinski, who won awards for his work in commercials before breaking through with the quirky family comedy Mouse Hunt.

Ted Kotcheff continues his First Blood fervor with Uncommon Valor. Gene Hackman stars as Cal Rhodes, a former Marine Colonel who has been getting the run-around for ten years from the government concerning the disappearance of his son and his buddies - all Marines who enlisted years prior and served in Vietnam. Rhodes’ son was last seen in Laos, where he was fighting in the war and captured as a POW. When word gets back to Rhodes that the men may still be alive and held in prison camps, but the government still has the men listed as missing in action, Rhodes decides to take matters into his own hands. Contacting an old friend, oil baron MacGregor (Robert Stack), Rhodes is granted financial backing to form his own incursion force. He assembles a crack team of men, puts them through an intensive period of training. and heads back with them into the Laotian jungles to search for the MIAs.

After the little white lies of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997), director David Mirkin focuses on scheming of a different sort in Heartbreakers. Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt play Max and Page Conners, a mother and daughter who share everything with each other: relationship advice, hair and makeup hints, and the money they win in costly divorce settlements with rich men. When the film opens, the Conners are putting the finishing touches on conning Dean (Ray Liotta), an auto-body shop owner. When the dust from that scam clears, Page announces she’s ready to move away from her mother and set up shop on her own — but in order to clear an outstanding debt, Max insists they bankrupt one more bachelor together. They settle upon phlegmatic Palm Springs widower William B. Tensy (Gene Hackman), a chain smoker with a heart of gold and a similarly bountiful bank account. Only two things stand in their way: Tensy’s Teutonic caretaker Miss Madress (Nora Dunn) and beachfront bartender Jack (Jason Lee), a wry stargazer with whom Page becomes unexpectedly smitten. Heartbreakers is the third collaboration from writers Steven Mazur and Paul Guy, whose previous screwball comedy was 1997’s international hit, Liar Liar.

This gritty, fast-paced, and innovative police drama earned five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (written by Ernest Tidyman), and Best Actor (Gene Hackman). Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Hackman) and his partner, Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), are New York City police detectives on narcotics detail, trying to track down the source of heroin from Europe into the United States. Suave Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) is the French drug kingpin who provides a large percentage of New York City’s dope, and Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi) is a hired killer and Charnier’s right-hand man. Acting on a hunch, Popeye and Buddy start tailing Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and his wife, Angie (Arlene Faber), who live pretty high for a couple whose corner store brings in about 7,000 dollars a year. It turns out Popeye’s suspicions are right — Sal and Angie are the New York agents for Charnier, who will be smuggling 32 million dollars’ worth of heroin into the city in a car shipped over from France. The French Connection broke plenty of new ground for screen thrillers; Popeye Doyle was a highly unusual “hero,” an often violent, racist, and mean-spirited cop whose dedication to his job fell just short of dangerous obsession. The film’s high point, a high-speed car chase with Popeye tailing an elevated train, was one of the most viscerally exciting screen moments of its day and set the stage for dozens of action sequences to follow. And the film’s grimy realism (and downbeat ending) was a big change from the buff-and-shine gloss and good-guys-always-win heroics of most police dramas that preceded it. The French Connection was inspired by a true story, and Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, Popeye and Buddy’s real life counterparts, both have small roles in the film. A sequel followed four years later.

The action producing-directing team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott is back with another thrill-a-minute ride called Enemy of the State. Taking its “innocent man accidentally caught up in political corruption” story from such films as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, they turn up the high-tech volume in an attempt to create the ultimate action film. Robert Clayton Dean, played by Will Smith, is a devoted father, husband, and attorney shopping for a sexy gift for his wife. What he doesn’t know is that he was given a videotape from a friend (Jason Lee) regarding the recent murder of a U.S. senator led by corrupt National Security Agency official Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight). Now Reynolds is after Dean to cover his tracks or, as the audience soon finds out, frame Dean for Rachel’s murder. Since Dean isn’t up on his high-tech gadgetry, he needs the aid of ex-intelligence operative Brill (Gene Hackman). Between the explosions and chases is the subtext of George Orwell’s 1984 mantra “beware of big brother,” as Dean realizes that in the modern world, there is no such thing as total privacy.