Loose Cannons is another oddity in the buddy cop genre (I’ve been on a kick lately), a film that feels like a jigsaw puzzle made from a collage of old TV Guide movie plot blurbs. The kind of thing you’d find left behind by an insane asylum inmate escapee. That’s my exceedingly sloppy way of saying it’s all over the place but once in a while you can pick up something that looks like a great plot point.
It pairs Gene Hackman and Dan Aykroyd as mismatched partners in a high-stakes murder investigation that meanders into absurdist Nazi conspiracies, but the film is less about the case and more about how these two wildly different performers bounce off each other. A movie like this lives and breathes on the chemistry of its leads, but you get a sense no one bothered with a table-read before the cameras started rolling.
Hackman plays Mac Stern, a grizzled, hard-boiled detective, while Aykroyd is Ellis Fielding, a genius investigator with a multiple-personality disorder that has him slipping into different characters at the most inconvenient moments. It sounds like a great pitch.
Co-written by Richard Matheson (with his son), and directed by Bob Clark, the man behind A Christmas Story, one of the most beloved holiday films of all time, but also Porky’s, it tries to mix slapstick humour with action thriller elements, and the result is… awkward? Confused? Belligerent? It doesn’t seem to like itself much.
It’s a buddy cop adventure that’s constantly at odds with itself. I’ll give it props for trying something different with the treatment, but where it want to be a comedy, a thriller, and a character study all at once, it never gets the dosage exactly right. Yet, that’s also what makes it so fascinating. If I could psychoanalyse any film, I’d love to sit this one down and have it tell me about its childhood.
It’s no award winner, but it’s an interesting study – a flawed, uneven experiment that’s worth watching just to see how, and here comes the pun, committed everyone is. -Pop