Product Description

A Pittsburgh homicide cop who testifies against his partner and cousin is demoted to river patrol and mysteriously, old girlfriends become the latest of a serial strangler's victims.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: R
Release Date: 7-MAY-2002
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10622 in DVD
• Brand: WILLIS,BRUCE
• Released on: 1998-07-14
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 102 minutes

Customer Reviews

Underrated Genre Gem
Bruce Willis at the peak of his action hero form playing a cynical hard-boiled cop trying to fight the system. A pre-Sex and the City Sarah Jessica Parker at the peak of her cuteness. Great character actors like Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore, Brion James, Tom Mahoney, and Andre Braugher. Superb on location cinematography shot by Mac Ahlberg in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a cool genre score by Brad Fiedel (love that saxaphone love theme) and on the mark (and wonderfully over the top) direction by Rowdy Herington of Road House fame. Striking Distance is a nice little hard boiled action gem that seems to be slowly gaining a nice little cult following. For fans of 80's and 90's action films, this is a movie worth seeking out.

Bruce vs. the wretched serial killer
Bruce Willis would not be the first actor to bag on their own work. Some people might take the fact that an actor bags on their own work as a very authoritative statement and not bother seeing such a film. If the actor doesn't like their own film, why should anyone else bother? But I think such need not always be the case, and this movie is one good example. And artist is always critical of their own work, and rightly so. But just because they see things they don't like about their own work or something else about a film they are in, does not mean that others will certainly see the same things for the same reasons.

After seeing a trailer for this movie on a dvd I have, I came upon an IMDB post about a Bob Costas' TV interview (I've never seen it myself) and Bruce Willis saying he knew this movie was crap when he was making it, and that this experience made him decide to choose projects based on the projects merits and avoid Hollywood tripe. For this and other reasons, I did not bother to pursue getting the movie at the time. Recently, I came across this movie in a Wal-Mart $5 discount bin and being a Bruce Willis fan I grabbed it. After watching it, I find it easy to say that even though I don't care much for movies involving serial killers, this was a decent enough flick that would have been worth it had I paid $10 instead. It could be defined as typical Hollywood tripe, especially if you're an actor who's been in the business for years and are looking to expand your horizons. But not all tripe is truly tripe. Bruce did a decent enough job going up against the killer, and the movie was not just tired and boring and by the numbers. It looks and sounds good, has good production values and cinematography, is fairly suspenseful and entertaining. In the big picture it's probably fairly typical of this type of movie, but if you want to see Bruce Willis go through the paces in the taking down the serial killer routine, it's a decent and interesting take on it all and without a lot of in your face gore or anything.

Incidentally, I and plenty of others think that Hudson Hawk rocks! Some people just don't get it I suppose.

HUH?
I was really surprised by the number of negative reviews of this movie. Granted, STRIKING DISTANCE, is not one of Bruce's best films, but I found it to be solidly entertaining, cliches and all. And I think it had some very good twists that I didn't see coming. I found the whole cast, (even (...)Sarah Jessica Parker) to be commendable in their roles. Special kudos to Robert Pastorelli, Dennis Farina and Tom Sizemore. I wanted to be entertained and STRIKING DISTANCE certainly filled the bill for me!!