A throwback to an age when action movies had room between shoot-outs and car chases for dialogue — real dialogue, not rim-shot-ready one-liners — and character development, veteran director Richard Donner's efficient urban thriller sends a cop on his last gimpy legs and a small-time crook looking to change his sorry life on a torturous journey that's no less epic for being three-quarters of a mile long. It's 8:02 am and alcoholic burnout Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis), an NYPD detective who's just marking time until he can retire and apply his pension to the task of drinking himself to death, is about to clock out after working a long, booze-soaked night shift. But before he can vacate the premises, Mosley is handed one last job before quitting time: Escort a chatty, cockeyed optimist of a habitual offender named Eddie Bunker (Mos Def) from his holding cell in Chinatown to the Centre Street courthouse less than a mile away, where Bunker is scheduled to testify before a grand jury. All Mosley has to do is get Bunker there before 10 am; if he doesn't, the jury will be dismissed and the case will be forfeited. Even allowing for New York traffic and Lower Manhattan's torturously narrow, congested streets, nearly two hours should be plenty of time. But when you add to the mix a posse of corrupt and heavily armed cops determined to kill Bunker before he can spout off about the time he saw Detective Shue (Robert Racki) doing what bad cops do, the short trip becomes a gauntlet — in fact, it becomes a time-compressed, big-city variation on THE GAUNTLET (1977), which featured Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke as the pickled cop and the witness he has to escort from Las Vegas to Phoenix so she can testify against a mess of dirty cops. As Bunker and Mosley dart in and out of buildings, scramble across tightly packed rooftops and race through interconnected basements, Bunker, who nurses the unlikely dream of becoming a baker specializing in children's cakes, and Mosley, who's so sick of himself he'd rather die than look at himself in the mirror one more time, have developed the inevitable rapport. The film's saving grace isn't that its plot is particularly unpredictable, it's that Donner and screenwriter Richard Wenk give the actors time to put some flesh on their characters' bones. Mosley and Bunker start out as cliches dressed up with mix 'n' match eccentricities, but by the end there's more to each than the sum of his quirks, and their small victories feel all the sweeter for having been earned. --Maitland McDonagh
