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THE HITCHER
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Boring actioner about a psychotic hitchhiker whom the scriptwriter makes unkillable. Contrived, unbelievable, and ultimately dull thriller is one more film to waste Rutger Hauer.
You want a thriller with lots of mindless action, no logic, and a bunch of fractional-dimensional characters. Cable this month is running what passes for entertainment in some quarters. The film is THE HITCHER and as a friend of mine would say, it sucks pond water. Actually I think this one could turn back a raging river.
Our main character--I don't think we ever get his name so I will call him Poor Schnook--is a teenager driving a car from Chicago to San Diego by way of nearly empty Texas roads. Schnook picks up a psychotic killer played by Rutger Hauer, who adds one more implacable killer to his list of roles. Hauer had better start being more selective in his roles or he will lose the aura he had from SOLDIER OF ORANGE and BLADERUNNER. From the point he gets picked up, Hauer does everything right. He is always in just the right place at the right instant. It is not long before the police think Poor Schnook is the killer and these are not your ordinary police. They have intelligence roughly equivalent to protozoa. In a scene we see only the aftermath of, Hauer has wiped out an entire police station with apparently no more than a knife. In one carefully choreographed scene, with one bullet Hauer knocks out one police helicopter and two police cars whose occupants somehow missed seeing the slowly dropping helicopter fall. The more destruction there is, the more the police want to kill Poor Schnook and the less interested they are in hearing his claims that someone else is responsible.
The plot of the innocent bystander who gets in over his head is standard thriller stuff and can be well done. The innocent bystander against the villain who does everything right is an old one. In a sense THE HITCHER has the same basic (very basic) plot as NORTH BY NORTHWEST but instead of the characters and the wit, THE HITCHER gives us just more mindless action scenes. Perhaps part of the reason audiences are getting more unruly is that in a film like NORTH BY NORTHWEST you want to hear what the characters are saying, while in a film like THE HITCHER it is much less important. And one car engine sounds a lot like another. Rate this one a -2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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