Crime Lords Reviews

A wild and woolly cop swashbuckler, CRIME LORDS walks a narrow line between cliche and spoof. It's not THE NAKED GUN, but uses fidelity and respect for the urban action-adventure genre to come up with some choice self-parody. Elmo LaGrange (Wayne Crawford) and Peter Russo (Martin Hewitt) are your basic mismatched partners on the LA police force. LaGrange is a boozy, luckless slob, while Russo is a cocksure--but often quite stupid--young stud, the son of LaGrange's former partner. The two trace a stolen car to a chop shop and try to make a dramatic arrest. The Asian hoods running the place open up with an artillery barrage and get away; Russo's tossed cigarette accidentally blows up the place; and TV news cameras catch LaGrange's subsequent racist diatribe. Suspended by the force, the pair decide to redeem themselves by tracking down Ling (James Hong), ringleader of the car thieves ... all the way to Hong Kong. Russo precipitates a series of disasters when he tries to smuggle his gun through customs, but eventually they stumble upon Ling, who turns out to be a respected figure in the island's business community. Ling holds Russo captive, trying to determine if the young officer is corruptible or just really dumb. Meanwhile LaGrange is on the run and accidentally becomes the "owner" of a young peasant girl. She leads him to Russo, and the pair confront Ling and his compatriots at an auto-parts warehouse in a showdown that reveals the real scheme behind the car-theft operation. Actor-producer Wayne Crawford is a regular on the B-movie circuit. His productions vary widely in quality but usually star himself and feature chases galore, exotic locations and a touch of native mysticism. CRIME LORDS marked Crawford's directorial debut, and he pulls it off with flair and assurance. Thie first third of the film is a model of economy, mixing the action with just the right flavoring of deadpan satire. The story lags when the locale switches to Hong Kong and Crawford stops to absorb some local color. Crawford also makes an empathetic leading man, even though his sadsack demeanor turns into Dirty Harry when convenient. Hewitt came to prominence out of nowhere at age 17 when Franco Zeffirelli chose him to star opposite Brooke Shields in 1981's notorious ENDLESS LOVE; the young actor's been paying his dues ever since in minor potboilers. Here Hewitt enjoys his best role to date. With a conscious nudge at the Mel Gibson character from the LETHAL WEAPON movies, he replicates both the shoulder-length hair and the nude scenes. The difference is that Hewitt's character has more earrings than street smarts. Words can't do justice to the scene in which he innocently and uncomprehendingly accepts a bribe from Hong (also good as a villain with a better-than-usual motive). CRIME LORDS came to videocassette in 1991 with a regrettably generic ad campaign. Subsequently it showed up on TV network affiliates as a late-night movie, with the rougher stuff excised, such as the opening credit soundtrack of torrid lovemaking between Hewitt and a police captain's wife. Says she, in the throes of ecstasy, "Read me my rights, you stinking pig!" Devoted fans of the cop-action genre can have just as much fun with CRIME LORDS. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, nudity.)