Back in the 1980s, the kind of action movie that now goes straight-to-video actually made it to theatrical movie screens. Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone all made movies that, to varying degrees, made decent money at the box office. Rutger Hauer was not one of the big names in the action genre. Despite some success in movies like Blade Runner, Ladyhawke, and The Hitcher, Hauer was not exactly a marquee name. Still, in 1987, he was top-billed in Wanted: Dead or Alive, a standard issue action movie with a premise that wouldn’t seem entirely out-of-place today.
Wanted: Dead or Alive casts Hauer as Nick Randall, great-grandson of Josh Randall, the character Steve McQueen played in the TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive in the 1950s. Nick Randall is a bounty hunter who used to work for the FBI until they betrayed him. Now, he “collects the garbage” from the streets and avoids dealing with the authorities as much as possible. When a terrorist named Malak Al Rahim (Gene Simmons) blows up a movie theater and threatens to turn Southern California upside down, Randall is called in by the feds as the only man who can bring him down.
Although the movie was obviously made in the 1980s, it remains highly watchable today. Hauer makes for a decent hero (or, in this case, anti-hero) and he’s got some good one-liners to throw around — a prerequisite of action films of the day. Although the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, it provides a fair number of situations for Hauer to get down to business as Randall.
Gene Simmons, who’s better known as the blood-spitting bass player for the rock band KISS, makes an adequate bad guy. It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t get a lot of screen time. I’m still not quite sure what the connection between Nick Randall and Al Rahim actually is, but Simmons and Hauer manage to make the climax of the film worth seeing.
Also of note is Robert Guillaume, who played Benson, the butler in the 1970s TV series, Soap, as Agent Walker, Nick’s friend and contact in the FBI. He seems to be having a good time playing the foul-mouthed Walker and he delivers a few great one-liners himself.
The budget for Wanted: Dead or Alive was obviously small but it still manages to deliver a decent enough time if you’re in the mood for a disposable action film from a time before these types of films retreated to the bargain bin of the local video store.
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
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