Black Moon Rising (1986)

All too often, I find myself seated before a movie that seems to get strikes across the board – the comedy is bad, the drama is inert, the horror is dull, the action is predictable, the characters barely exist, the direction is unfocused and the narrative is a mess.  This happens more often than I would like to admit.  The action-thriller Black Moon Rising doesn’t rise above any of this except in one area, the presence of Tommy Lee Jones.

Jones is an actor whose presence brings a certain gravity and weight.  He has a lived-in quality, the kind of organic earthiness and weary masculinity that reminds me of Robert Mitchum.  For me, he’s the only thing keeping a sleeping pill like this from going completely taking its toll.

Jones is in the middle of what feels like a TV pilot, the kind that never gets picked up.  As the movie opens, he’s a professional thief named Quint who is hired by the FBI to break into a nefarious company and steal evidence needed in a grand jury trial.  But – whoops – Quint hides the evidence in the trunk of a prototype new sports car named The Black Moon, which itself is stolen.  That puts him in league with another professional thief, this one played by Linda Hamilton, who was last seen running from The Terminator.

You can see where all of this is going.  There’s a tussle between Jones and Hamilton before romance becomes part of the deal.  There is car chase after car chase and we get to see The Black Moon outrun everyone who is looking for it.

Does it make sense?  Heavens no.  But since the movie was determined to stay on the track and never veer off into anything that wasn’t predetermined from the start, it fell to Jones to bring it back down to Earth.  This is a stupid car chase movie grounded by an actor who seems unable to be anything but the best that he can be.

That leads to another obvious question: since this is a car chase movie, are the car chases any good?  Well, with speed and clever editing, yeah, I guess it’s kind of functional.  But it’s also obligatory.  One of the keys to great car chases like the ones in Bullitt and The French Connection and Raiders of the Lost Ark is that there are stakes.  Here its just stunt work.  We are suppose to be interested in this high tech car, but frankly it looks less like a high performance dream machine than by something that was rejected from Star Wars.

So, how do I deal with the movie.  I want to recommend it for Jones, but not the movie itself.  It is so static and so formula that you’ll be bored by it, but then you’ll miss Tommy Lee Jones.  I’d say, skip this mess and watch him in Coal Miner’s Daughter or his Emmy-winning work in The Executioner’s Song.  He can do anything, apparently, and that includes giving his all in a bit of torpor like this.