Mary Mara | Through the Shattered Lens

Lt. John Moss (James Woods) is a cop with a problem. A serial killer who calls himself the Party Crasher (Stephen Lang) is killing people all across New York and he has decided that he will be coming for Moss next. However, Moss’s captain (Delroy Lindo) says that Moss is off of the Party Crasher case and, instead, he’s supposed to babysit a big time movie star named Nick Lang (Michael J. Fox)!

Nick is famous for playing “Smoking” Joe Gunn in a series of Indiana Jones-style action films. However, Nick wants to be taken seriously. He wants to play Hamlet, just like his rival Mel Gibson! (That Hard Way came out a year after Mel Gibson played the melancholy Dame in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.) Nick thinks that if he can land the lead role in a hard-boiled detective film, it will give him a chance to show that he actually can act. To prepare for his audition, he’s asked to spend some time following Moss on the job. Mayor David Dinkins, always eager to improve New York’s reputation, agrees. (David Dinkins does not actually appear in The Hard Way, though his name is often mentioned with a derision that will be familiar to anyone who spent any time in New York in the 90s.) Of course, Moss isn’t going to stop investigating the Party Crasher murders and, of course, Nick isn’t going to follow Moss’s orders to just stay in his apartment and not get in his way.

The Hard Way is a predictable mix of action and comedy but it’s also entertaining in its own sloppy way. Director John Badham brings the same grit that he brought to his other action films but he also proves himself to have a deft comedic touch. Most of the laughs come from the contrast between James Woods playing one of his typically hyperactive, edgy roles and Michael J. Fox doing an extended and surprisingly convincing impersonation of Tom Cruise. Woods and Fox prove to be an unexpectedly effective comedic team. One of the best running jokes in the film is Woods’s exasperation as he discovers that everyone, from his girlfriend (Annabella Sciorra) to his no-nonsense boss, are huge fans of Nick Lang. Even with a serial killer running loose in the city, Moss’s captain is more concerned with getting Nick’s autograph.

Woods and Fox are the main attractions here but Stephen Lang is a good, unhinged villain and Annabella Sciorra brings some verve to her underwritten role as Moss’s girlfriend. Viewers will also want to keep an eye out for familiar faces like Penny Marshall as Nick’s agent, a very young Christina Ricci as Sciorra’s daughter, and Luis Guzman as Moss’s partner.

With its references to David Dinkins, Mel Gibson’s superstardom, and Premiere Magazine, its LL Cool J-filled soundtrack, and a plot that was obviously influenced by Lethal Weapon, The Hard Way is very much a period piece but it’s an entertaining one.

Back in the 90s when I was a kid I would occasionally be up late watching whatever was on cable. Sometimes it was one of those late night cable movies I review and other times it was some adult themed show I wasn’t going to see on network television. In this case there was a very short lived animated series called Spicy City on HBO that was created by Ralph Bakshi of American Pop and Fritz The Cat fame. Each episode would have a character named Raven, voiced by Michelle Phillips, who would introduce us to some story that took place in it’s cartoon film noir Blade Runner type future. I thought I would revisit this show for the fun of it.

This episode opens up as a severely overweight man with a robotic arm is thrown out of the bar Raven is at. She goes into a side room where there are some booths that allow you jack into a virtual world. She enters it, and we enter the story.

This is our main character (I say that cause I really didn’t pick up his name in the episode) who enters the virtual world and because they are only working with about a half hour here, he immediately meets a girl that he falls for.

But before this goes anywhere, there’s a knock on her door and she leaves the virtual world. This is when we are introduced to Alice (Mary Mara) and her scuzzbucket boyfriend Jake (John Hostetter).

She’s hot and sad while he’s a sleaze and would love it if he could get rid of the “bitch inside”, but keep the body. Alice and our hero meet up again briefly that way they can tell us how the episode is going to end. He mentions he has something called a “brain scan” so that she never has to leave the virtual world.

Jake decides to visit the best virtual investigator around, which happens to be our hero. He says his wife died recently, but a virtual avatar she made to keep him company while he is on the net won’t leave him alone. He wants her deleted. He warns Jake that could kill someone if they are real, but a little money flashed his way gets him jacked in.

Of course Jake’s avatar is a shark. In no time they run across Alice, and Jake reveals his true colors. They jack out and Jake takes the software that can be used to delete Alice. Now he has to go back in to try and stop her from being killed, but Jake is already getting to work on destroying her soul.

They wind up in a place where the virtual world deletes unneeded things. He keeps begging her to jack out, but she won’t because she doesn’t want to go back. She ends up on the conveyor belt to death as she screams for help.

Jake shows up and sends both him and our hero to a boxing ring. Jake proceeds to beat the crap out of him. That is until he gets a little love boost…

After stopping Jake in the ring, he returns to the belt, decompresses her, and they fall to their death/deletion..sort of. Jake comes in and finds that “the bitch is gone, but the party’s still on.” Well, sort of.

She crumbles into a pile of dust. Don’t worry about Jake cause he just calls up some other girl to use. Meanwhile, the brain scan our hero turned on at the last minute worked and to borrow from Brazil: Love Conquers All.

Then we cut back to Raven next to the guy she went inside with.

Well, it’s nice to know that Raven and this random guy were going at it while we were being told the story of two people who killed themselves to be together. A story that when they are seconds away from falling to their deletion still manages to get me choked up. I’m very weird about what things will and won’t make me emotional. Apparently, the first episode of Spicy City does it for me.