Target Reviews

Walter Lloyd (Hackman) is a mild-mannered lumberyard owner in Dallas, Texas. His son, Chris (Dillon), is a bored 20-year-old who has dropped out of college to pursue an unlikely career as a race car driver. When Mrs. Lloyd (Hunnicutt) is kidnaped while on vacation in Europe, Walter immediately takes decisive action and flies to Paris with Chris in tow. Once in Europe, Chris is surprised to learn that his dull dad was once a top spy for the CIA--and he has not forgotten the violent tricks of the trade. Through a series of old contacts, including a former mistress, Walter learns that his wife has been snatched by Schroeder (Berghof), a rival spy seeking revenge for an incident 18 years before. What follows is a wild chase throughout Europe wherein father and son gain new understanding of each other while working feverishly to rescue Mom. Misunderstood by many at the time of its release, TARGET is another entry in a series of genres picked apart and reexamined by director Arthur Penn. Having taken on gangster movies in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), westerns in LITTLE BIG MAN (1970) and THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1976), and detective films in NIGHT MOVES (1975), Penn turned his eye on the espionage genre in TARGET. Whereas most critics at the time of its release assumed Penn was merely incapable of directing a taut thriller, what Penn was really doing was subverting expectations by either downplaying or exaggerating generic conventions to absurd extremes. The result is a deadpan satire of the espionage film that explores the accepted logic forming the basis of the genre. Although not as interesting as some of Penn's other genre experiments, TARGET is worth seeing if only for the inspired teaming of Hackman and Dillon.