Walter Lloyd (Gene Hackman) runs a Dallas lumber company. His son Chris (Matt Dillon) repairs stock cars and doesn't get along with him. His wife Donna travels to Paris but she goes missing. Father and son go off to look for her. Soon the stodgy businessman Walter turns into a man of action without Chris' knowledge. Walter is approached by two gun men with Donna's jewelry but he turns the table on them. He used to work for the CIA and reconnects with an old college Barney Taber (Josef Sommer). Chris saves his father from another gun attack and he finally comes clean to his son.Matt Dillon is overplaying the bratty know-it-all rebellious teenager role. He overplays everything by a little like when he is first told. Hackman is more of the lead and he's very solid. It's a worthwhile watch for Hackman fans. It goes to lesser seen location like Germany. It's a competent spy action thriller but Matt Dillon's character keeps annoying me with his arrogant ignorance. He's being shot at, his father is a secret spy, his mother is kidnapped and he's still chasing tail.

"Target", from writers Howard Berk and Don Petersen, is an intelligent spy thriller that conjures up memories of the best war time efforts, yet never quite gets into enthralling or gripping gears, suffering as it does from a rather obvious conclusion.Gene Hackman is one of my favourite screen personas, and even though he is not at his best here, he is still good. Matt Dillon's turn is one of his best, Josef Sommer reprises a familiar role while a promising Gayle Hunnicut doesn't get to do enough.Director Arthur Penn is unable to maximise the potential of this clever premise. Though in some scenes he does well, at times surprising and even thrilling us, "Target" simply lacks a touch of class. Perhaps in other hands (Lumet or Pollack) this could have been something.Wednesday, October 22, 1997 - Video

The first time I saw this, about ten years ago, I thought it was pretty cool. Zippy car chases, nicely staged, up and down stairs in Hamburg, in and out of passageways, and so forth. Three -- count 'em -- three gorgeous women. Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon, a couple of engaging actors. And it had an interesting premise, too. Young man doesn't get along well with his dad, discovers dad was a CIA spy, develops new respect for him.But I just saw it again, less distracted by the puzzling plot, and it was something of a disappointment. The women are just as gorgeous, Gene Hackman is as good as he almost always is, and the shenanigans with the cars are as exciting, but the rest seems pedestrian, almost amateurishly done -- from the script to the direction.I'll give you an example of what I mean. Hackman and Dillon are driving on a crowded road outside of Paris. Hackman is driving slowly and Dillon impatiently urges him to speed it up. Hackman, his eyes on the rear-view mirror, says, "We've got company." Then he shifts into a lower gear and the Peugot leaps ahead. "What are you doin'?" Dillon exclaims. "Seeing how good he is," replies Hackman with a slight smile. There follows a high speed chase with cars twirling around on wet sandy roads, through some kind of quarry, and it ends with Hackman confronting the other driver and telling him to quit following him. The chase is fine. But it's pointless. Why is the car chase in the movie anyway? "Seeing how GOOD he is?" That's the reason these lives are put in danger for five hectic minutes? Not to mention the Peugots? That would be a great motive for a car chase in a kiddy cartoon.The rest of the plot is almost as weak. Matt Dillon's character is a complete irritation for the first third of the movie. He seems to have nothing but contempt for his father, although Hackman doesn't seem to be guilty of much more than losing the kid's jitterbug bass lure. Dillon is always noodging him, the way Captain Ahab was always noodging Moby Dick. The kid is a dumb, self-indulgent slob and Hackman can never do anything right. Well -- that's okay as a proposition, but it's very poorly delivered, and Dillon's character is turned into a strident stereotype. Furthermore, Dillon himself gives an artless and unconvincing performance in a role that maybe nobody could convincingly enact. When Dillon finds out his father, whom he'd thought to be an ineffective stick-in-the-mud, was a spy, he almost begins to weep as he goes through his lines -- "You've been lying to me all this time." Dillon ought to be elated at discovering his Dad's secret identity.Another curious incident, among so many curious incidents: the evil guys (and man, do they LOOK evil with their black leather coats and their rimless spectacles as thick as Coke bottle bottoms) have kidnapped Hackman's succulent wife, Gale Hunnicutt, because he has information they want him to spill. So the first thing they do when he steps off the plane is try to massacre him in a drive-by shooting? Did I miss something? Why kill someone you need to wring information from?I won't go on, I guess. It's still an engaging movie if you're seeing it for the first time because you don't know where it's going to turn next. And the location shooting is interesting too, reminding us that in the middle of a chill wintry drizzle even Paris doesn't look so hot, never mind Hamburg. It has other exciting moments that I haven't mentioned. Identities twist themselves inside out unexpectedly. I don't want to get into that and possibly debase the film's chief virtue.

The plot of Target is quite reminiscint of Roman Polanski's Frantic which was released three years later. In the latter, Harrison Ford plays a doctor who's wife is kidnapped during their stay in Paris. It had a lot of good action sequences (like Harrison Ford dodging bullets on the roof of an apartment building) and a good, suspenseful story. In Target, Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon play father and son, Walter and Chris Lloyd. Walter's wife has been kidnapped during her visit to Paris and as both father and son will soon find out, it is related to Walter's former work in the C.I.A., something of which his son was never aware.The movie spends more time with the father-son bonding than it does in providing a very energetic story. This is because of the relationship between the characters, who don't have much in common. This leads to a lot of interruption in what could be good action to have those father-son moments.I think that is the downfall to what really could have been a good thriller. There were some good action scenes, especially car chases, but Walter and Chris seem to waste far too much time in this movie even though seem to remark about what an emergency it is to find Mrs. Lloyd and save her from the kidnappers. In 'Frantic,' Harrison Ford's character does a lot of bullet dodging and never seems to quit until he finds out what happened to his wife. In 'Target,' on the other hand, the scenes are often too slow moving despite the ability to be much better, given the motive for kidnapping Walter's wife in the first place. That's really a shame, too, given the great potential you have with an actor like Gene Hackman, who's proven he can do great things with action films (see The French Connection and Enemy of the State). If this is the kind of movie you're looking for, I'd recommend watching 'Frantic.'