No Mercy Reviews

While by no means a great detective film, NO MERCY is a fairly entertaining, albeit predictable story that benefits from a good performance by Richard Gere. Eddie Jillette (Gere) is an undercover Chicago cop who, with his partner Joe Collins (Gary Basaraba), follows up on a tip that takes them to Paul Deveneux (Terry Kinney), a New Orleans hood who needs someone to kill his boss, Losado (Jeroen Krabbe). But Losado has been trailing Deveneux and manages to kill him and Collins. Losado then takes his mistress, Michel Duval (Kim Basinger), and heads back to New Orleans. Devastated by the brutal death of his partner, Jillette ignores the warnings of his superior officer (George Dzunda) and flies down to New Orleans to find Losado. He first finds Michel in a ramshackle nightclub and handcuffs himself to her. Losado is in hot pursuit as they escape into the Louisiana bayous. There's not much beneath this story: NO MERCY is a lean thriller with an uncomplicated linear plot. What hampers its overall impact is an occasional reliance on genre cliches, an unbelievable ending, and Basinger's performance. Director Richard Pearce is able to tell an interesting story here in spite of an elementary script.