Stakeout

A couple of weeks ago, I looked through my DVR and thought I saw that the movie Stakeout was going to run on July 21, so I watched it to do the blog post on it. As it turned out, I was off by a week, and it's actually on HBO Comedy tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM.

The movie starts off with a daring prison escape. Caylor Reese (Ian Tracey) is making a delivery to a prison; it just so happens that his cousin Richard "Stick" Montgomery (Aidan Quinn) is in that prison. Well, it doesn't "just so" happen; of course the point of Caylor's beeing there is to break his cousin out of prison.

Cut to a pair of cops, Chris (Richard Dreyfuss) and Bill (Emilio Estevez with an amazing pornstache), in Seattle. They're chasing a criminal in the fish market area of town. Bill is trying to move up the ranks, while Chris seems to have his own way of doing things that isn't always by the books and obviously isn't always going to work as planned. In this case, that involves a forklift winding up in the drink, much to the consternation of their boss.

Montgomery, it turns out, is an escapee from a federal prison. He's got a lot of contacts, too many for the feds to be able to deal with all of them. His girlfriend at the time he went into prison is Maria McGuire (Madeleine Stowe), and she lives in Seattle. The feds make the reasonable assumption that perhaps Montgomery might head toward McGuire's place, so perhaps it would be a good thing if some of the Seattle cops would stake out the place. Chris and Bill are one of the pairs given that job, and make their way to the house across the street to start their surveillance.

Of course, there's only so much you can do sitting by a window and looking across the way, as James Stewart learned in Rear Window. It would be quite helpful if they could bug Maria's phone. To that end, Chris cuts the line and then magically presents himself at her door as a repairman from the phone company, even though he's not wearing the proper uniform and she's dumb enough not to ask him for identification. She lets him in, and Chris bugs the phone.

But, in talking to her, he finds that he's falling in love with her, something which is not completely unexpected since this is a movie. Granted, it's a complete violation of police policy, and if Bill had any sense he would have turned Chris in, with the surveillance footage, and gotten Chris fired and another pair put in their place. I guess that adage about there being only a few bad apples among the cops doesn't hold.

Anyhow, sure enough, Montgomery is coming to see Maria. But he shows up... while Chris is in the house trying to tell Maria the truth, which is probably another serious violation of police procedure that goes unpunished. It's necessary, however, for all of this to lead to the film's climactic chase and fight sequence at a sawmill near the old Skid Row.

Stakeout is an entertaining enough movie, if you're willing to suspend disbelief. I have to admit, however, that I had some difficulty doing so, because some of Chris' behaviors were rather obnoxious. It reminded me of those old "comedies of lies" as I like to call them, where Chris has to keep piling one lie on top of another, all the while doing things that should probably cause the stakeout to come crashing down. With that in mind though, Dreyfuss shows he's good at comedy lighter than what he'd done in The Goodbye Girl, as well acceptable at action. Estevez was the right age to be doing these action movies, and shows he could handle comedy. Stowe is there to look pretty, and Quinn does well as the bad guy.

The last I looked, Stakeout is available on DVD, as is the sequel, imaginatively titled Another Stakeout.