Nighthawks

I've talked at great length on here before about being a fan of Sylvester Stallone's. One of his films that I've failed to talk about however is a tense action movie from 1981, Nighthawks.

Stallone and Billy Dee Williams play DaSilva and Fox, two NY beat cops who have been reassigned to a terrorist task force. Their main target is a dangerous assassin named Wulfgar, Rutgar Hauer in his first American film. After barely escaping the two, and injuring Fox, Wulfgar and DaSilva engage in a battle of wills.

Originally this was going to be the third French Connection movie, with Gene Hackman and Richard Pryor in the leads. When Hackman passed on the project, the script was rewritten to be a Stallone vehicle. That being said, there's still some humor between Stallone and Williams which was probably leftover from the original script, making this one of the first of the buddy cop movies.

Stallone, and the rest of the cast, are solid, but Hauer steals the show as the psychopathic Wulfgar. Supposedly Stallone and Hauer butted heads during production, but the two have praised eachothers performances in recent years.

The original director, Gary Nelson, who also did Freaky Friday and The Black Hole...go figure, was fired early on and replaced by newcomer Bruce Malmuth. Stallone supposedly took over a lot of the directing duties, even editing the film afterwords when the studio had a problem with the amount of violence in it.

Even with all of the on set drama, this is still an intense and exciting action picture. And one that's more relatable in the world that we live in today.

It's available on dvd and blu ray.