Walking the Edge

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 ****

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?

After witnessing the murder of her husband and son at the hands of drug dealers, "Christine Holloway" (Nancy Kwan) is emotionally traumatized to the point that she is temporarily committed to a sanitarium to assist in her recovery. That being said, when she is eventually released she becomes obsessed with the idea of obtaining her revenge upon those who killed her family. Meanwhile, a taxi driver by the name of "Jason Walk" (Robert Forster) is also having his own personal problems which are only exacerbated with his other job as a collector for a local numbers racket. Unfortunately for him, things quickly go from bad to worse one day when he reluctantly picks up a woman in his taxi who asks to be taken to a couple of locations. Little does he realize that this same woman is about to shoot and kill two different men and that he is soon to be considered as an accessory to these murders. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this could have been a good crime-drama under the right circumstances but the apparent low budget and uneven acting greatly hampered that effort. Even so, I don't consider this to be a bad film by any means and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

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.

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.