Nighthawks

"You go to a better life"

We think of Sylvester Stallone now as one of the key action heroes of the 1980s, 90s and 00s, but unlike Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Segal he didn't start out in this mold. The modern action film (as we know it) didn't really come about until the 1980s, so apart from his rags-to-riches routine in Rocky, Stallone didn't really seem to have a very clear purpose as an actor in the 1970s. He floated between odd dramatic projects like F.I.S.T. and Paradise Alley before he finally found a successful career trajectory in the 1980s. That trajectory starts with Nighthawks, a cop-thriller that is arguably the first film to cast him as an action hero.



Nighthawks isn't a particularly well-remembered film but it's fairly good as far as these sorts of films go. Stallone is the hip New York city-jiving cop who's at one with the streets; a nice guy who's more Serpico than Dirty Harry. This makes quite a contrast with the European villain; a fanatical and cold-blooded terrorist named Wolfgar (Rutger Hauer), who's more or less the progenitor to Euro bad guys in the Die Hard films. Nighthawks is a cop film that looks at how terrorism works and why it must be fought (still pretty topical some 30 years later). It doesn't have the best sense of pace or plotting but Stallone and Hauer are great in their respective roles, both young and hungry enough to put in some thoughtful performances.



Stallone is interesting to watch because his character isn't your typical trigger-happy man of action. He stops his partner (Billy Dee Williams) from resorting to violence on more than one occasion, and wants nothing more than just to get on with living a regular life. It's not a showy role like John Rambo or Rocky Balboa, most of the time Stallone underplays it in accordance with the fact that he's meant to be a regular joe just doing his job. Williams on the other hand comes across rather unsympathetically as the partner, a typically two-dimensional angry black cop. Together their policework entails a special and unlikely brand of entrapment where Stallone disguises himself as an easy target on the street (a defenceless woman, or a rich businessman) so that they can bust petty crooks directly.





Wolfgar is a German but he adapts a variety of accents and disguises as part of his cover. He starts out the film as a liberal communist stereotype; a guitar-slinging, bespectacled and bearded leftie-type. But this isn't who he really is - he's actually a highly dangerous man with a flair for seduction. This plays into the American Cold War-orientated fear that commmunists walk amongst 'us', with his various lady-friends having no inkling of his true nature. His lefty disguise at the film's beginning also explores the fear that hardline terrorists exploit the soft left as a place in which to hide, suggesting that leftism shouldn't be tolerated to any degree as it can harbour dangerous fringe-dwellers. Hauer (as usual in his earlier roles) is suitably mesmerising as the character. He gets all the film's best scenes, his British accent is fairly good but his attempt at American comes out pretty mangled and unconvincing. My main criticism of the character is that his motivations are rather nebulous and undefined - we never find out exactly who he represents or why, just that he's a terrorist that sees himself as a political hero.



At one point Wolfgar demands the release of political prisoners but they seem to be a variety of nationalities that only suggest communism as a shared trait. Maybe I'm too far removed from the Cold War context, but I found this to be lacking in detail. In the 1980s 'terrorist' was no doubt a byword for 'communist', and so the film makes no effort to offer any internal context. It's similar to the way films in the 00s seem to feel it's unnecessary to offer any background to fictional versions of post 9/11 terrorists. I find it fairly problematic, it's short-sighted because the filmmakers have no consideration for history... they seem to think the issues of the day will last forever and that future audiences will automatically know that 'communist' and 'terrorist' are interchangeable terms. I understand that films reflect the attitudes of their times, but there's a propaganda element at play in the way Nighthawks looks at terrorism (00s films too) that's a little too obvious and generalised for my taste.



You'll be sure to find all the cop movie cliches and tropes in Nighthawks - the doomed partner, the cop who lost his wife because he's married to the job, the shouty and uncooperative boss, the rogue hero who's also a loose cannon, the foreign and psychopathic villain, etc. This is part of the fun though, and this is very much an action film made in the 1980s - well before the genre got neutered and became curiously bloodless. Nighthawks isn't non-stop violence but when violence does appear it's brutal and visceral - completely at odds with what mainstream Hollywood serves up now. This is also a film that thinks it's believable that cops in New York carry around shotguns and it has a cool finishing act that, while it seems paced poorly, at least comes as a surprise.



DIRECTOR: Bruce Malmouth

WRITER/SOURCE: David Shaber and Paul Sylbert. Originally planned as The French Connection III.

KEY ACTORS: Sylvester Stallone, Rutger Hauer, Billy Dee Williams, Lindsay Wagner, Persis Khambatta, Nigel Davenport, Joe Spinell



RELATED TEXTS:

- The French Connection, to which this film was originally meant to be a sequel.

- Cold War-era terrorism: The Day of the Jackal, Black Sunday, The Falcon and the Snowman.

- See also The Seige, for more on terrorism in New York City, and Die Hard.

- The ultimate criminals-hold-the-city-to-ransom action movie: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.