Review of Into the Night (2002) by Alessandro B — 27 Jan 2005

Rain in Brisbane = Rain in LA = Snow in Portland = Snow in Seattle = bumpercars on the road.

Took me forever to get to school and back today because the whole town was busy running into each other. The people here just can't handle rain. At all. And things are worse because on rainy days, apparently every single schoolkid in town MUST be dropped off and picked up by their parents, so traffic backs up while every parent in Brisbane drives to the school to drop off their kids and smash into other parents. Can't have them walking - god forbid if one of their little sprogs becomes damp. Geez. Glad to be back home.

Back in '85, one day Andy and I borrowed Jim's car and went to see Into the Night. The next day we went back to see it again, and brought Jim and Dave along. For the next couple of weeks, it seemed like I quite regularly ran into Andy and Jim - when I asked them what they had been up to, they would look sheepish and say that they just gotten back from seeing Into the Night. If you had asked us to assess the merits of the film, the conversation would go something like this:

How is Into the Night? Great!

Why? Well, it has come to our attention that Michelle Pfeiffer is a reasonably attractive woman.

Why else? It's funny when the Iranian hit men shoot the doors that they can't get through. Did we mention Michelle Pfeiffer?

etc.

When it was all said and one, I had seen the movie three times, and I have no idea how many times Andy and Jim saw it. Five? More? In any event, after that, I always had it on my list of movies that I really liked. So just for the hell of it, I watched it again this week.

And was appalled. Turns out, it's not a very good movie. Parts of it are extremely mean-spirited, the plot is sloppy, I didn't really find any of the old laugh lines funny, and several of them were actually actively disturbing, too many cameos by film directors that really can't act. So now, for me, John Landis is back to only having made one really good film in his career - Groundhog Day.

The two leads, Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer, are pretty good. There are still a couple of pretty funny scenes. But it is supposed to be mainly an action movie, and there is no tension. And it has all those other problems. So I guess either skip it, or remember it fondly. Just don't watch it now.

One thing did still stand out though - that Michelle Pfeiffer - she's fairly attractive...