'NARROW MARGIN'......GENE HACKMAN, WELL-TRAINED.......

Narrow Margin (1990)     Like  all movie lovers, we deeply miss Gene Hackman's comforting presence since his retirement from acting.......

               We doubt, however, if anybody misses or even remembers writer-director-cameraman Peter Hyams, who pumped out some moderately diverting movies through the 80's and 90's......

              But the BQ never forgets.......(except where we laid our car keys last....)

               In earlier, more forgiving decades, a mid-range, mid-level journeyman like Hyams might have enjoyed a prolific career cranking out B-movie fodder for the bottom half of double features.....he could have ended up with hundreds of movies on his resume.........

              Since his last film came out in 2013, we're assuming he's retired too.

               He had a modest talent for glib, sarcastic dialogue (which shows up in spurts throughout his films) and an entertainer's instinct for crafting audience-pleasing scenes. Also functioning as his own cinematographer, he bounced through every genre imaginable........action, suspense, sci-fi, horror, comedy, romance........never fully mastering any of them.

               To use baseball analogy, Hyams could hit singles, doubles, maybe even slide into third base every so often.........but a home run was beyond him.

                You might have had a good time watching some of his films.........but you always left knowing they fell short somehow, that they lacked that extra effort, that extra spark of talent to make them better. (We'd credit him with one exception here, "2010", his straight ahead sequel to Kubrick's "2001".....his most emotionally and structurally satisfying film.)

                "Narrow Margin", his remake-update of Richard Fleischer's classic 1952 trainbound noir, is typical of Hyams' other thrillers like "Capricorn One" and "The Star Chamber".......overloaded with ludicrous plot holes and ridiculous twists.....

                But it barrels along swiftly, energized and gifted with Gene Hackman, playing an assistant District Attorney facing off against a team of hit-people determined to bump off his star witness (Anne Archer).  Stuck in the wrong time and place, she saw a mob boss kill her blind date for the evening. The mobster, apparently with more infrastructure than Ernst Stavro Blofeld, deploys both helicopter machine gunners and ground troops to wipe her out.

                Hackman and Archer take refuge on a train zipping through the Canadian wilderness......hence no jumping off.  And since it's 1990, no cellphones to call for help. We wish we could tell you this all moves fast enough to make you forget all the story inconsistencies.......but this is a Peter Hyams film we're talking about......

                His snappy dialogue worked overtime to cover up his dopey storytelling......but only up to a certain point.

                One big plus though........whatever his faults, Hyams knew his way around an action sequence. Hackman and Archer's climactic showdown with the mob crew on top of the speeding train is everything you'd want it to be.......(even when it's capped off with a last minute blatantly unsurprising surprise...)

                 Please come back, Gene. We miss you. As for you, Peter Hyams, you can enjoy retirement......there's already way too many mediocre directors currently cranking out films just like yours.....the Wal-Mart $5.00 bin is filled to the brim with 'em.  2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2),