The Hard Way

This is a small action-thriller of the vigilante subgenre, so popular in the 80s, with the great Robert Foster being forced to help a woman to find revenge against the gang that murder her family. The villain is performed by the always creepy Joe Spinell and the movie manages to keep things interesting, even with its extreme low budget and very thin script. The acting of these two and the grittiness of the film is by far the best of it.

Fairly awful revenge flick casts Robert Forster as a former ball player-turned-cab driver, operating a vintage yellow-checker taxi in Los Angeles, who is hired by a smartly-dressed Asian woman packing heat. She's on a personal mission after seeing her husband and teenage son murdered by a low-life drug dealer and his goons. Seems the husband was dealing to kids behind her back and holding out on his 'friends'; now she's out to settle the score, and the cabbie finds himself sympathetic to her cause. Curt Allen's florid, overwritten dialogue doesn't appear to trip up the players (Forster, Nancy Kwan, A Martinez, or cult character actor Joe Spinell), though after awhile it becomes clear Allen doesn't have any other talent beyond inventively stringing together f-bombs and n-words. The violence is standard for '80s B-grade trash, while the loving relationship between Forster and Kwan blossoms out of nowhere. *1/2 from ****

My review was written in January 1985 after a Times Square screening.

Filmed in 1982 under the title "A Deadly Chase", "Walking the Edge" is an antiquated vengeance picture, harking back in most respects to the blaxploitation cycle of a decade earlier. Action prospects are modest for this indie acquisition released by Charles Band's Empire Pictures.

In a strong central performance (overcoming extreme deficiencies in Curt Allen's scriptingand Norbert Meisel's directing), Robert Forster toplines as an L. A. cabbie and numbers runner named Jason Wall, accidentally thrown in with femme-in-trouble Christine (Nancy Kwan), whom he adopts as a protector against gangsters led by the nasty Brusstar (typecast Joe Spinell). One of several irritating plot gaps has Christine suddenly resurfacing, after a violent teaser, opening which has Brusstar and cohorts kill her husband and son, to become a one-woman vengeance squad inolving cabbie Wall.

While harboring Christine at his house and continuing his daily numbers rounds, Wall gradually catches the revenge bug himself, particularly when his garage mechanic buddy Tony (A Martinez0 is brutally tortured and killed by Brusstar. Pic ends unsatisfyingly with star duo having successfully wiped out all the bad guys and facing a non-future.

Qualifying as a B-movie at least two decades after the Bs went out of fashion, "Edge" lacks the colorful casting and intriguing plot twists that made such pictures delightful.

Gore is substituted for exciting action setpieces and the vulgar dialog will need considerable laundering for tv use. Apart from Forster, who inserts sly touches to take the sting out of another sadistic anti-hero, acting honors go to Frankie Hill, stopping the show as a feisty prostitute who first castigaes Wall but later helps him out in a pinch.

Violent film packs suspense , noisy action-packed , intrigue, thrills and lots of violence . They drove him to the edge, and on the edge there are no rules , all hell broke loose when they stopped .. . Regular crime thriller of the 80s that went on the ¨Vigilante genre¨ which Bronson had created as architect Paul Kersey turned avenger . A Los Angeles taxi driver named Jason (Robert Forster) , whom also works as a collector , crosses paths and later helps a distraught widow called Christine (Nacy Kwan) on the run from mobsters after a quartet of heinous hoodlums murder her family . The nasties stalk the couple who is submitted to a brutal hot pursuit and Jason protects her . Both of them get caught up in the crime underworld of the city . The taxi man takes the law into his own hands, searching vengeance on crooks, hoodlums and muggers . Jason seeks vendetta , shooting in cold blood , abusing on civil rights and killing mercilessly nasties. Finally, there happens a moving , edge-of-your-seat climax .

This exciting movie contains thrills , chills , suspense , noisy action-packed , gun-play and lots of violence and some gore , including obnoxious executions . It's certainly thrilling , though the morality may be questionable , even in this time, as the spectators were clearly on the Jason/Robert Forster side . This disgusting story looks increasingly passionless and mechanical and violence seems to be considered some moment excessive . Passable acting by Robert Forster as a yellow cab man as well as numbers runner for a local mobster , turned vigilante seeking to revenge and Nancy Kwan as a mature woman affected for the murder of her husband and son . Forster does what he can with this lousy screenplay and story . Acceptable support cast such as A Martinez as Tony , Jim Fitzpatrick as Body Guard , James McIntire as Jimmy and Joe Spinell as Brusstar . Crispy and screeching musical score by Jay Chattaway , usual composer of the 8os . The motion picture was middlingly directed by Norbert Meisel , husband's Nancy Kwan . This exciting but mediocre film belong to ¨Vigilante genre¨ whose main representations are ¨Charles Bronson's Death Wish¨ such as ¨Death wish II¨ ¨Death wish III¨ , ¨Death Wish 4 : The crackdown¨and ¨Death Wish: The face of death¨ and , of course , ¨Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry¨ movies , such as ¨The enforcers¨, ¨Sudden impact¨ , ¨The dead pool¨ . Furthermore , other notorious movies on the ¨Revenger¨ genre that achieved their splendor in the eighties are the followings : ¨Exterminator¨ I and II with Robert Ginty ; ¨Dark Angel¨ with Betty Russell ; ¨Steele Justice¨ with Martin Kove ¨; ¨The Punisher¨ with Dolph Lundgren , ¨Joe Don Baker's Walking tall¨ saga ; ¨Lorenzo Lamas's Snake eater¨ saga , ¨Arnold's Raw Deal¨ , ¨Stallone's Cobra¨ and many others .

You've got to feel a little sorry for Nancy Kwan's character at the beginning of "Walking the Edge." She's just found out that her husband has been pushing drugs to school kids, and then watches as that husband and her young son are snuffed out by a quartet of L.A. thugs. She escapes from this carnage, only to suffer a mental breakdown and subsequent institutionalization. And that's just the first five minutes of what turns out to be a fairly standard revenge story, but one graced by fine acting from Robert Forster and the inimitable Ms. Kwan. Forster plays an average-Joe guy, the type he excels at; he's a part-time cabby and also a runner for a numbers racket. Like the Nancy Kwan character, life has pushed him around a bit too much lately: His old lady has been cheating on him, he can't muster the gumption to lean on bad debtors, and he doubts whether he will ever become a Big League pitcher, his dream. But when he gets involved with Nancy's revenge scheme, his life takes a sudden turn... I'd like to say that this movie was well-done fun, but the fact of the matter is, although I enjoyed it up to a point, I am still objective enough to know the smell of cheese when I sniff it. Yes, the acting is adequate, as is the editing, and the directing (by Ms. Kwan's husband), but still, something was missing for me. Perhaps it's the fact that the script contains an unbelievable amount of cursing and profanity. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a prude when it comes to language. But when every other sentence is "F that" and "Mother this," it gets a bit redundant. The next time I see this movie (if there is a next time), I think I'll try counting just how many obscenities there are. My rough guess would be around 350. In addition, the vengeance that Kwan and Forster take on the thugs at the end of the film is waaay to simply accomplished. Granted, these bad guys are a bunch of real goofballs, but Forster and Kwan have a much too easy time of it. Just about every character in this film is either a thug, a drug addict, a hooker...certainly no City of Angels, that's for sure! The film also features gory shots of shot-up victims, a drill-torture scene, multiple knifings, fisticuffs, and loud punk rock. This is a far cry from Fred and Ginger doing "The Continental," but for some people, hey, "That's Entertainment"! I'm trying to be objective here, but the fact of the matter is, the mere presence of Nancy Kwan in any movie is enough to guarantee me a fun time. Nancy, 44 years old in this movie--and more than twice her age in her yummy "Suzie Wong" debut--looks absolutely stunning. What a physiognomy! What zygomatic bones! The high point of this film, for me (and this should tell you something about the film in a nutshell), is when Nancy, injured after having had a hubcap "Frisbee'd" into her ribs, takes off her blouse and stands around in her bra. Does anyone out there know how to say "Be still, my quivering gonads" in Chinese?