peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2010 03 11 Tightrope

Tightrope

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Another Eastwood, this time from the early 1980s. The cinematography is washed out, just right for some seemy police work in pre-Katrina New Orleans. It tries to fish for a new angle on the psycho-thriller, but that particular character is shallowly drawn and implausibly generic, along the lines of Malkovitch in In the Line of Fire. The focus is on the cop played by Eastwood, a bit of a down-at-heel Dirty Harry who gets organised with the lady from the rape crisis centre. Arnie plays a similar cop in End of Days; was it never a cliché?

Again, I saw this on the strength of that New Yorker article. Overall OK but difficult to talk up as anything great. One for the Underbelly crowd.