An artist witnesses a mob killing and calls the police. At the police station she realises that the Mafia has a man in the force.Trailed by the police, who need her testimony, and a Hit-man hired by the Mafia, she goes to Mexico.She eventually she meets the Hit-man, who has become infatuated after studying her art and life to prepare for the kill....I don't know if it was to do with the version I saw, which was just the generic version that is on general release, but I found myself wondering, what is it with all these very good actors starring in something so generically average? Were they all desperate to work with Hopper? or is the three hour version so wonderous, it was too brilliant to show, as no other film could ever be made again.I feel that someone had some secret photos of someone, somewhere.It's basically a chase movie, then a slavery movie, and then finally some sort of strange Bonnie and Clyde-esque caper.But the film really doesn't know what it wants to be. It's too strange to be action, too sleazy to be romance, and just too sinister to be a comedy.It's almost as if Hopper is wanting to channel David Lynch, but doesn't have a clue.Saying that, it's never boring, Foster and Pesci are wonderful, and it's got one of the most abrupt endings ever.Not good, but worth watching.

Alan Smithee (i.e. the late Dennis Hopper) must have been walking with a permanent limp after firing this particular bullet into his foot. The quality of shooting was mediocre at best, the dialogue was poor and heavily clichéd. The acting was like watching a group of people, some of them olympic class swimmers, trying to tread water with a sinking battleship tied to their feet. Joe Pesci and Charlie Sheen are missing from the credits, perhaps because they insisted on it. John Turturro has since, thankfully, shown great skill (Quiz Show) but in this he must have been sleepwalking. Jodie Foster was ever pleasant to look at but even her talent couldn't bring the stillborn dialogue and maimed story to life. Hopper's ludicrous accent was at least funny. Vincent Price sat under a fancy hat and greatcoat in a stretch limo and looked suitably glum.Stockholm syndrome could not account for Anne's (Foster) sudden change of heart toward her captor. Empathy may develop but most people don't feel moved enough by it to start looking for the bedroom. A professional hit-man would never allow him/herself to fall in love with a target, unless they were already thinking of getting out of the game though perhaps that was the point. The final section of the movie, the escape from the mob in a helicopter had me looking at my watch but to be honest I'd been doing that from about ten minutes in. If you find any of it believable there may be a brat of a movielet somewhere within but this version was worthy of going straight to Betamax and thence to the bin.I'm wondering if qaaludes were involved somewhere. For example Easy Rider was not great because of what it was but because of what it represented and how it resonated with counterculture people at the time. Mr. Hopper probably lived a lot from the fat of that. His best role remains as the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now and that was because he wasn't really acting; everybody was stoned.

This movie really left me thinking ... but not about the plot, the direction, the characters, an underlying message, or a clever script. Far from it. I was left wondering what in Sam Hill went wrong behind the scenes. Clearly, something was badly amiss from the beginning.I'm amazed at the positive comments for the movie and for Jodie Foster's performance. From the get-go it was clear that Foster had phoned this one in. One earlier comment even made a favorable mention of her facial expressions. I must have been watching a different movie since Ms Foster (usually a personal favorite) seemed to be totally disinterested.In one of his first scenes with Foster, Fred Ward looks as though he, also, is distracted by her lack of energy and he struggles to deliver his own lines with any enthusiasm. By the time he's called upon to take part in a supposedly desperate search for runaway Foster, Ward also seems to have become embarrassingly half-hearted about the project.In my opinion, Dennis Hopper has always been a uni-dimensional performer, so I wasn't expecting much from him ... and he delivered.Yes, this one left me thinking long after it ended. The fact that Joe Pesci and Charlie Sheen refused to have their names attached to the project suggests that this was a real stinker for everyone involved. But to then learn that the Director preferred to hide behind a pseudonym speaks volumes.But why listen to me? I always think Foster looks ridiculous in a dress, yet she's sensational in lacy underwear.

Backtrack does have an intrigue, and as others have wrote, it goes downhill in the later acts. But all the filmmakers had to do when Milo the hit-man calls in his marker to claim (lies) that he has knocked off the woman witness after their weird love-affair and wants his pay is to make that killing claim the truth. He should have bedded her, then disposed of her. Then surely audience tears would have fallen. They turned what was potentially a stunning ending into a far-out shoot-out with cops and bad-guys inside a flammable industrial plant. Seeing Jodie Foster nude in the shower was a rather pleasant thing. Vincent Price as a mafia don was a slight miscast. All in all, I'd see this movie again.