Walter Hill has always been a filmmaker who has always worn his heart – not to mention his influences – plainly on his sleeve, be it mining past movies for inspiration or indulging in the type of man’s man action thriller that repeatedly casts anti-social misanthropes as their leads. In many ways, Hill’s a little bit like John Carpenter as most of his films have high concept scenarios, stripped back plots and often place like bizarre westerns – but like Carpenter, Hill was also heading into a brand new decade where his particular themes would soon feel a somewhat outdated to modern audiences.
However, before 90s action movies well and truly got into the swing of things with more vunerable protagonists and weirder plots, Hill managed to sneak one more action/thriller in in the shape of Trespass, a movie that not only is a pretty loose reworking of 1948’s The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, but also seeks to latch onto the boon in urban dramas that featured predominantly black casts like Boyz N The Hood and New Jack City.
Arkansas firefighters Vince and Don are in the midst of trying to search a raging Inferno for survivors when they come across a crazed old man ranting among the flames. But before the deranged, raving old coot roasts himself alive while screaming that he stole from Jesus Christ, he hands the stunned guys an envelope that contains a map of an old tenement building, a newspaper clipping and a gold cross and before you can say exposition dump, Vince and Dom realise that they’ve got a life changing opportunity on their hands.
You see, whoever’s this guy was before he barbequed himself to death, he once robbed a church of a shit-load of gold way back in 1940 and then stashed it on the fifth floor of a place in East St. Louis, Illinois and whomever finds it will be undoubtedly set for life. This is extra hopeful news for Dom who is currently experiencing major financial issues, the the two load up Don’s truck with pick axes and a metal detector and boogie on down to St Louis to make their fortune. However, almost from the moment they arrive, things start to go hideously wrong, with the arrival of Bradlee, an old homeless guy who has made the ramshackle building his home, but even as Dom orders him tied to a chair in order to guarantee that the claim to the gold is their’s and theirs alone, matters get exponentially worse with the arrival of King James, a gang leader who has shown up with a bunch of lieutenants (including his half-brother, Lucky) in order to execute one of his enemies.
After being spotted by the more panicky Vince after wasting the guy, King James and his cronies lay seige to the building, hoping to take out the witnesses before they go to the cops, but as this stalemate grows ever more convoluted, surely the odds of anyone escaping with the gold are as remote as a Starbucks at the North Pole.
For such a basic premise, there’s some serious creative heat lurking behind the scenes of Trespass. For a start, the original script was written back in the 70s by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the main, driving force behind Back To The Future, but you couldn’t hope to find a film further divorced from the time-hopping antics of Marty McFly and Doc Brown. For a start, ensuring that the film has less chance of passing the Bechdel Test than an hour of stand up from Andrew Dice Clay thanks to there being no women featured in it whatsoever, it not only feels tonally in tune with Southern Comfort – another film from big Walt that ups its study of masculinity under pressure by barely including any members of the opposite sex – but it also bring it in line with other unbearably tense, single gender, tough guy movies such as The Thing and Reservoir Dogs.
However, while Trespass isn’t anywhere near an unforgettable experience as either of those two movies and Hill himself is content to keep things moving as more of a straight thriller rather than making any salient points about the nature of machismo, the movie works as a tight, no bullshit action/thriller that moves with unstoppable propulsion thanks to an absolute kick-ass cast and a hard-bitten dedication to keeping things deceptively straight forward. For a start, it’s pretty fucking awesome that Hill cast both Bill Paxton and William Sadler to be his leads as both men, while building up quite the hefty resume of inctedibly memorable supporting roles and bad guy performances, rarely got a chance to carry a movie on their own.
Paxton plays Vince as someone who is obviously a tourist in the world of potentially lethal get rich quick schemes and while his constantly terrified performance wisely never slips into the iconic sniveling of Private Hicks, he’s nicely relatable when the shit hits the fan. On the other hand, still fairly fresh from the naked tai-chi of Die Hard 2 and the German accented Grim Reaper of Bill And Ted, Sadler gifts Dom with a more ruthless streak which has you waiting to see if and when he chooses to start stabbing his buddy in the back at the prospect of all that gold. It’s a great double act and Hill interestingly never makes either what you’d call a “good guy”, which helps stir the pot immensely when Cubes Ice and T arrive to rachet up the tension. Interestingly, Hill restrains himself from making the gangbangers typical villains too and gives each member their own little thread to chase. Ice T’s King James is every inch the cold-blooded killer, but he’s hugely protective of his junkie half brother, Lucky (played by another Die Hard alumni in the form of De’voreaux White), while Ice Cube plays the constantly angry Savon as a more headstrong, chaotic version of Doughboy from Boyz n the Hood and backing them up are the likes of Tommy Lister Jr., Stoney Jackson, Glen Plummer and Bruce A. Young. But the fact that these guys aren’t your average, cookie cutter villains means that you’re genuinely unsure who is going to emerge from this thing with a bag full of gold and who is going to end up drilled with more holes than a woodpecker’s training board. Of course, what with this being a Walter Hill gig, a bullet riddled fate is a given for most of these guys and the director wields his usual, heavy-handed kind of violence with his usual flair for the dramatic – after all, why have someone shot to death, when they can be shot, tumble through a plate glass window, fall a fatal distance and collide with some power cables on the way down? Noice! However, Trespass isn’t without its flaws.
While mercifully avoiding the rather easy topic of race by making no one in the film truly good, you feel that maybe Hill could have played with the aspect of class a bit more considering everyone here is desperate to make a quick buck. Also, some of the frentic gunplay ends up being a tad repetitive, with not one, but two pairs of adversaries both killing themselves on two separate occasions by unloading their guns into each other in almost simultaneous fashion.
The early 90s were a period where the action movie struggled to find its identity as the genre moved on from oiled up, one man armies to something slightly more relatable, but if it’s pure, sweat soaked, cordite smelling thrills you want, Trespass will sneak you in.
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