Review of To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) by Ola G — 20 Feb 2011

Richard Chance (William L. Petersen) and Jimmy Hart (Michael Greene) are United States Secret Service agents with the Treasury Department, assigned as counterfeiting investigators in its Los Angeles field office. Hart is on to master counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), but when going on his own to check out Masters hideout in the desert, he is surprised by Masters and his men and gets brutally killed. Chance swears he will get Masters, no matter what and with any kind of methods. Legal or illegal. With his new partner John Vukovich (John Pankow) they start a hunt for Masters that leads them into a spiral of violence and unorthodox methods..

This was quite nice to resee! I reckon I saw "To Live And Die In LA" in the late eighties, but back then the Swedish censorship bureau worked in mysterious ways and the action was a bit crippled. So, good to see it in its original version. I reckon I like this movie partly due to the nostalgic feeling it brought to me with a classic neo-noir eighties structure. Nice performances, good action, a story with some nice twists and turns and a great soundtrack by Wang Chung. And it´s always cool to see William L. Petersen and Willem Dafoe as a bad guy. Nice one!