No Place to Hide Reviews

In this unwieldy combination of slasher thriller and domestic drama, two lost souls fight their emotional neediness and drift toward a new family bond. After insisting that her sister Tinsel (Drew Barrymore) hide a videotape, dancer Pamela Hanley (Lydie Denier) is stabbed to death by a heavily cloaked figure in the middle of a ballet performance. The case is assigned to Joe Carvey (Kris Kristofferson), a burned-out cop who has lost his family to a drunk driver, by superior officer Frank McCay (Martin Landau); in the course of investigating Pamela's murder, Carvey reluctantly takes her sister under his wing. After thugs open fire on a car driving Tinsel to a foster home, Garvey takes matters into his own hands and stashes her at the home of wheelchair-bound ex-football pro Wheeler (O.J. Simpson). But the hit men hunting for the videotape slaughter Wheeler and nearly kill Tinsel, moving Garvey to risk further misconduct charges by hiding the antagonistic teen in a nunnery. Carvey accompanies his partner Karen (Dey Young) to McCay's mansion, where Pamela used to hang out. There, it transpires that McCay is not only the lover man on Pamela's videocassette, but also runs an upscale vigilante group out of his swank house. The wealthy crimebusters invite Garvey to join them by offering up the drunk driver who killed his family, but the principled cop declines. Shooting McCay, Garvey escapes and heads for the nunnery, having been warned by Karen that the group intends to eliminate Tinsel. After a shoot-out that leaves the upper-class crimefighters presuming Garvey is dead, the grizzled cop and his surrogate daughter escape to build a new life together. NO PLACE TO HIDE is a mawkish family drama awkwardly welded onto an assembly-line crime thriller, with a vigilante plotline lifted from 1983's THE STAR CHAMBER. The identity of the madman is too easy to guess; if a film takes pains to disguise the killer, you know that someone familiar to us in the plot will turn out to be guilty. The angst tossed back and forth between the hardened cop and the wayward adolescent is painfully contrived, and not helped by wooden performances from the two leads. Adding to the problem is Barrymore's droning, stream-of-consciousness voice-over, which pops up far too often. (Nudity, graphic violence, extreme profanity.)