Hi, it’s Burl, reviewing this picture as quickly as
possible! Ha ha, I’ve got a number of movies queued up and ready for review,
but this one, which I watched just last night, bounded to the head of the pack
simply because if I don’t do it now, I’ll forget everything about the movie and
won’t be able to tell you a thing except that, despite the fact that it features two actors who would famously do the loop-de-loo later in life, it’s totally forgettable!
And it most certainly is that! I was working in a video
store when this one came out, and recall seeing bits and pieces of it on the
video store TV! My impression was that it was one of those high-style 80s
movies like Less Than Zero or To Live and Die in L.A., where the
pastel clothes and the neon lights and the swimming pools and blinding white
walls overwhelm just about everything else in the movie! (I’ve never seen Less Than Zero, but I quite like the
Friedkin picture, just for the record! Ha ha!)
No Man’s Land
turned out not to be that! Well, there are a few moments of 80s style, and
those were the moments that had conned me so many years before, I guess! But
mostly it’s pretty flat, like a TV movie, which makes sense because it comes
from a mostly-TV director! (They say TV shows are more stylish now, but ha ha,
I wouldn’t know!) There’s not much suspense in the suspense scenes, if indeed
there were any suspense scenes, and the car chases were determinedly
unthrilling!
I guess ultimately it’s a people picture! We follow a young
rookie cop played by D.B. Sweeney from Eight
Men Out as he’s recruited by Lieutenant Randy Quaid from The Wild Life and The Paper to investigate a Beverly Hills-based Porsche-theft ring!
Quaid believes most fervently that trust-fund slickster Charlie Sheen, from Due Date, is the maestro behind not only
the car thievery, but the murder of the previous undercover man assigned to the
case! Ha ha, wasn’t he lucky to immediately find another young cop with an
aptitude for repairing Porches!
Sweeney gets a mechanic job at the dealership owned by Bill
Duke from Commando, but quickly
becomes pals with Sheen, and quickly after that becomes sed*ced by Sheen’s
party-boy lifestyle (though Sheen claims to “hate drugs” – ha ha, he can’t
quite sell that line!) and his lovely if personality-free sister! Meanwhile,
many, many Porches are stolen and driven around – ha ha, there seems to be
hundreds of the things on every street! Of course it eventually all comes to a
head, secrets are revealed, and then there’s gunfire, end of picture!
Now, I said this was a people picture, and as such the most
interesting aspect about it is some of the relatively subtle characterizations,
particularly where Sweeney is concerned! He doesn’t become a Sheen
doppelgänger, which would be the easy way to go, but rather becomes his own,
rougher sort of slickster! Sweeney doesn’t do a consistently great job of
dramatizing the bifurcation he’s feeling, but, despite often seeming like a
poor man’s Spader, he’s not bad! Sheen is not bad either, and a mini-gallery of
character actors, including Quaid, Duke, M. Emmett Walsh from Blade Runner and Grandview U.S.A. (who gets a big credit at the beginning but
disappointingly is in the movie for all of a minute near the end), Claude Earl
Jones from Impulse and George Dzundza
from ‘Salem’s Lot (who was in No Mercy, No Man’s Land and No Way Out
all in a row, ha ha), keep the acting generally strong! Only the sister lets
the side down, I’m afraid!
It’s overlong and often dull, and could have used a great
deal more style and pep! I’m likely to forget quite soon that I ever
watched it, which is not a great sign! Whatever curiosity I developed about
this picture back in my video store days is now satisfied, and I give No Man’s Land one crooked cop!
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