Honor Amongst Men (2018, directed by Fred Carpenter)

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Honor Amongst Men?

Don’t even ask.

John Halmo (Robert Clohessy) is a veteran cop who is been on the job for so long that he wears a dinosaur pin. The film portrays one very long day on Long Island, as John deals with cocky young cops, squabbling drug addicts, his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father (Ed Asner), and a motorcycle gang war. Chuck Zito plays the the main motorcycle baddie. Joan Jett plays Stephanie, who spend a lot of time yelling. It’s cool to see Joan Jett in a movie.

Why is Chuck Zito such an unconvincing biker in this? He was a member of the Hell’s Angels for twenty-five years. He did time for the gang. If anyone should have felt authentic in this movie, it was Chuck Zito. But Zito seems lost. Maybe it’s the bad CGI that the movie uses whenever Zito shoots someone. Bad CGI and a bad performance.

Robert Clohessy is good, though. Clohessy’s been playing tough cops since the start of his career. Hill Street Blues, Oz, Blue Bloods, NYPD Blue, Homicide, Ohara (a show the featured Pat Morita as a detective), all of them featured Clohessy as a cop. Clohessy gives a great performance in Honor Amongst Men. It’s too bad that the rest of this disjointed film isn’t as good.

Honor Amongst Men is a film that wants to say something about how the world is changing and how there’s less room for honorable men like John Halmo. John is being pressured to retire. His father is losing his ability to remember the past. Even Chuck Zito is just a man looking for old-fashioned revenge. A lot of good movies have been made about honorable men suddenly finding themselves in a world where honor is disappearing and Clohessy’s performance is good enough that this movie’s message sometimes comes through. But the movie itself is disjointed and features too many scenes that just don’t work, either because everyone other than Clohessy’s is overacting or because the director lets them drag on for too long. Good intentions can only go so far.

The Eric Roberts Collection: The Night Never Sleeps (dir by Fred Carpenter)

Posted on April 4, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2012’s The Night Never Sleeps takes place over the course of one very long night in a New York city.

Sgt. Cavanaugh (Dan Brennan) is a tough and plain-spoken cop, the type who might not be great with pleasantries but who is a good enough policeman that he’s not going to let anyone stop him from avenging the deaths of the officers working under him. Each murder leads to Cavanaugh digging deeper and deeper into the city’s underworld. In between phone calls from his ex-wife (played by Eliza Roberts, wife of Eric) and meetings with the skeptical Inspector Romanelli (Armand Assante), Cavanaugh pursues a bloodthirsty hitman (Russ Camarda) and his boss.

The Night Never Sleeps is a low-budget police procedural, one that actually works far better than it has any right to. There’s hardly a cliche that isn’t present and there’s as few scenes where the nonstop “tough talk” verges on self-parody but the actors — especially Dan Brennan — all give good performances and the fact that the action was actually shot on location gives the film an appropriate gritty feel.

As for Eric Roberts, he plays a pimp whose cheerful manner hides a dangerous temperament. This is one of Roberts’s better cameo appearances. Not only does he seem to be invested in the performance but his character is also central to the plot. The film makes good use of Eric Robert’s off-center smile. On the one hand, he seems friendly, or at least as friendly as a pimp can be. On the other hand, there’s just enough fidgety nervousness beneath his amiable manner to indicate only as fool would turn their back on him.

The Night Never Sleeps is a flawed film but it still held my attention.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

January Positivity: Without Reservation (dir by Fred Carpenter)

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1989 film, Without Reservation, opens with a scene that should strike horror in the hearts of many viewers.

A high school basketball teams attempts to rap. Each member of the team takes a verse, introducing themselves and struggling to come up with an appropriate rhyme to go along with their name. I suppose that, as far as rapping goes, they’re about as skilled as you would expect any group of white, upper middle class suburban teenagers to be. This scene goes on forever and, oddly enough, it doesn’t really have much to do with anything else that happens in the film. One gets the feeling that it was only added to pad out the film’s 24-minute runtime. Perhaps it was added to let the viewers know that the filmmakers weren’t stodgy old men whose knowledge of music ended with Sinatra. No, the filmmakers were people who understood that sometimes teenagers enjoyed rap music. They were down with the youth.

(Actually, as much as I’m making fun of the scene, it may be one of the more realistic pats of Without Reservation. I went to an upper middle class high school in the suburbs. The majority of my classmates were dorky white kids who thought they could rap. Most of them were pretty bad but they were still better than the members of this film’s basketball team)

Anyway, once the rapping’s done, it’s time for six teenagers to climb into a car, drive too fast, and up getting hit by a truck. Four of the teens suddenly find themselves apparently floating in space in the remains of their car. They’re all dead and now, they’re waiting to find out where they’re going to go. Do they have a reservation in Heaven or not? Fortunately, there’s a man wearing a tuxedo (with a red bow-tie) who is working the heavenly registration desk. He has a big, bulky, old school computer. He asks for names and when he get them, he checks to see if they have a reservation. He ends up telling the majority of people to step to the left, which is a polite way of saying, “Welcome to eternal damnation.”

Needless to say no one in the car has a reservation. They all wish they could get one but it’s too late because they’re dead now. We watch as they’re told to step to the left. One of them ends up getting dragged over to a freight elevator and descends to the underworld. It’s actually an oddly effective image. If nothing else, the film does do a good job of creating an atmosphere of impending doom. And yet, it’s hard not to feel that, like so many similar films, the main goal here is to frighten people into compliance as opposed to making a case for one belief system or another. The emphasis is on punishment and pain and the film almost seems to encourage viewers to look down on those who don’t have reservations. Yes, the film seems to be saying, he may be able to rap but he’s still not in the system. Aren’t you glad that you’re not as dumb of Bill?

Anyway, Without Reservation is crudely effective, even if the ultimate message appears to be that the afterlife is a tacky resort with an out-dated computer system.