Stallone goes to head-to-head with Terrorist Hauer

NIGHTHAWKS (1981)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Nighthawks" is an incredibly over-the-top though occasionally diverting movie that could've used tighter pacing for a cop thriller - put it this way, "The French Connection" and "The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three" are far tighter and better paced. This film is exciting in spades but too often, the build-up is not quite there to sustain some incredible looking stunts.

"Nighthawks" has a chilling villain at its core, an international terrorist a la Carlos the Jackal named Heymar Reinhardt, alias Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer who sends chills to the bone). In an early scene, he bombs a London department store. Children are killed during the bombing and this irks some of his associates in the terrorist world.  

Enter Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams as New York undercover cops who become part of a team to thwart Wulfgar, who has moved to New York and changed his appearance through the divine art of plastic surgery. Stallone and Williams are briefed on Wulfgar's personality, his expensive taste and his need to live with women and run around in nightclubs. For some odd reason, Wulfgar keeps an arsenal of explosives in his girlfriend's apartment...could he not hide them somewhere else like a locker at Penn Station? The point is for these two supercops to think like him and this process is fascinating yet never explored in much depth. All we know is Stallone doesn't want innocent people killed.

"Nighthawks" unfolds with a more or less a steady rate of suspenseful scenes but Wulfgar is too enigmatic to understand - he is a terrorist who kills without much provocation (ditto his partner in crime played by Persis Khambata who is even more underwritten). At first Wulfgar bombs a few banks in New York at night and calls the media to glorify his position, but to what end? When he holds UN delegates in a Roosevelt Island cable car, he predictably kills one of them but his purpose is more sadistic than political. Of course, we root for the cops to nail him yet this could easily have been an extended episode of either "Dragnet" or "Adam-12" only with a lot more grit.

Stallone and Williams (sporting a Superman shirt) are well-cast yet their characters are severely underwritten. Stallone has a girlfriend who works in the fashion district (Lindsay Wagner in a blink-and-you-will-miss role) - either beef up her role or cut it out, one of the most thankless woman roles of the 80's (and I am not including those sex-starved Fort Lauderdale-type comedies). Still, the film deliver its action quota though, at times, it feels as if it needed more lubrication in its motor to keep it running (the cable car footage goes on way past the tolerable meter). The ending is a nail-biter and a keeper and Hauer is memorably chilling. The movie just needed more pizzazz.