When crafting a movie, it helps to have something of a cohesive vision of what the final product will look like. Tone, plot, characters – if there’s any disagreement within the filmmaking process, the chances are that your film will ultimately play like a big mess that’ll suffer thanks to clashing egos and multiple opinions. That’s essentially what happened with Striking Distance, a 90s, Bruce Willis thriller that plainly suffers from a major identity crisis, as the spectre of “creative differences” reared its ominous head and proved to be far more destructive than a marauding serial killer.
Director Rowdy Herrington may have once been able to wrangle the mighty force of Patrick Swayze’s devestating roundhouse kick in the absurdly entertaining Road House, but facing down hostile test audiences and a controlling star proved to be a bit much for the guy. But when your actions get you named “Orson Willis” in interviews, maybe getting a bit of Striking Distance from the final product is necessary…
Thomas Hardy is a Pittsburgh homicide detective that going through something of a stressful time of it. Not only is there a woman-throttling psycho out there that’s been dubbed the Polish Hill Strangler, but Tom’s opinion that the killer may be a cop is causing some friction with his fellow boys in blue. Furthermore, Tom’s also in hot water for recently testifying against his own partner and cousin, Jimmy Detillo, over his use of excessive force on a suspect, and he’s since been even more alienated from his colleagues – even if Jimmy’s own father, Captain Nick Detillo, says that he did the right thing.
However, the pressure cooker scenario finally explodes when, after a furious car chase with the strangler, Tom’s crashes his car with his cop father, Vince, in the passenger seat. Upon regaining consciousness, he finds that his father has been fatally shot and some random guy is ultimately arrested as the killer. However, just to further prove that when it rains, it pours, Jimmy commits suicide the day of his trial by hurling himself off a the 31st Street Bridge. Two years later, we find that Tommy is a full blown alcoholic and now has been reassigned to the River Rescue Squad after getting demoted for leaking his theory that the Strangler was (and probably still is) a cop. However, some familiar fears start to resurface when women who Tommy has once known start showing up dead after being abducted, shot and dumped in the sections of the river where he patrols. Convinced that the Strangler has returned, changed his M.O. and is now directly targeting him, Tom finds that no one, not even his Uncle Nick believes him. However, while he breaks in spunky new partner, Jo Christman, he starts to try and mount his own investigation – but is dating Jo while a serial killer is targeting past girlfriends really that smart of a thing to do?
As I mentioned before, the main problem with Striking Distance is that it’s never really quite certain what it actually wants to be. Some moments suggest that Rowdy Herrington has hoping to deliver an energetic action flick that delivers above-average car and boat chases, while Willis times snappy one-liners as he aggressively cocks various weapons. However, at the same time, it’s also trying to be one of those vaguely misogynistic, 90s serial killer thrillers that sees a bunch of disposable women abused and killed purely to give our hero an even bigger case of main character syndrome than he already has. But in addition to this, other things are thrown into the mix, such as a vaguely erotic and utterly illogical subplot involving him having a relationship with Sarah Jessica Parker’s rookie. Be honest, if you knew someone whose ex-girlfriends were getting murdered and showing up in your place of work, would you date them?
Tonally, the film is a mess as it clumsily switches gears between genres that weirdly refuse to mesh. Quite why the filmmakers couldn’t get the action and thriller aspects to link up is something of a mystery, as it seems fairly rudimentary, but the joins become even more apparent when a lot of the performances end up being equally as uneven. For example, Bruce himself may have tried to guide the production himself, but it results in a fairly awful performance for a character he should be able to do in his sleep. Simply put, it’s pretty hard to feel bad for Tom Hardy (sic) and all the terrible things that occur around him when it’s everyone else who is actually suffering. Who is truly the real victim here, Bruce’s boozy shit magnet, or multiple dead women and John Mahoney from Frasier? Similarly, the chemistry between Willis and Parker is soggier than the Allegheny River, and at times I couldn’t work out what was more distracting, the strange faces Willis insists on pulling whenever he fires a gun, or the incredibly awful wigs both he and Parker wear during some of the obvious reshoots.
However, while the rest of the cast follow suite and mostly try to outshout each other in copspeak, I have to admit that the cast – which contains Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore, Brion James, Andre Braugher and Tom Atkins – deliver enough tough-guy bellowing to keep things barely watchable. However, while the behinds-the-scenes issues are fairly prominent, that doesn’t mean that everything that Striking Distance does misses the mark. When the movie finally settles on a tone for longer than thirty seconds, it fares pretty well, with a banger of a car chase opening the film (complete with Bullitt-style hill jumps) and a kick-ass boat chase coming near the end. Also, Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs’ Little Red Riding Hood may be the most serial killery song I have ever heard in my entire life and it’s a shame that the somewhat predictable murder plot couldn’t match up to the sinister deployment of this haunting tune.
But, at the end of the day, we have a thriller that hasn’t the first clue about when it should be winking at you and when it should be jabbing a finger in your eye. Scenes that could have been incredibly dramatic get their metaphorical tyres shot out by the fact that they’re approached in the acting style of a dumb, 80s actioner, and the final denouement veers into the realms of the ridiculous when it’s suggested that zapping someone with a taser while you’re both in water will only fry them to death, but leave you miraculously unharmed. If Herrington and his cast were allowed to simply pick a lane, maybe Striking Distance could have been a more coherent outing that might have given us a washed-up Willis character to rival that of The Last Boy Scout – but as it stands, too many captains have obviously overturned this boat. “Who’s the best cop now?” demands someone at some point. No one in this film.
Striking Distance has its moments and there’s not too many places where you’ll see the dad from Frasier shoot out a tyre from a moving vehicle with a single bullet, but this isn’t anywhere near enough to keep this troubled thriller boyant – in fact, I’d suggest that keep your distance. Striking or otherwise.
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