Well, as I mentioned when I bought the DVD, I was familiar with the Phil Collins song “Against All Odds” from this film (spoiler alert: it’s over the end credits), but I’d never seen the film. Well, now I have.
In it, Jeff Bridges (not to be confused with William Hurt, although they were both that everyman, sensitive hunk in the early 1980s) plays an older wide receiver for the Los Angeles Outlaws who has been playing hurt but gets cut. So an old friend who is now a big bookie in the town–and who has goods on Bridges’ character–asks him to go to Mexico to look for a girl whom he says has stolen money from him. The woman is the daughter of the football team owner, also, which complicates things. Bridges goes to Mexico, finds the girl, and they fall in love and spend time together. He decided he’ll run away with her, but a football coach also under the thrall of the bookie finds them, and bloodshed occurs. Something something, real estate deal, bloodshed, and finis!
A bit slower paced than many things–one can see that they’re working hard on a modern noir, probably hoping to have another Chinatown or something (as in a later, more modern, but now fifty-years-old noir). But it just doesn’t make it. The sunny beaches of Mexico do not have the proper look and feel for it, and it just misses.
Also, I must admit that during a particularly steamy scene set at Chichen Itza, where action jump cut between entwined bodies and the carvings on the walls, that I was looking for an image of the fanged deity, but I guess that was too far south for Chichen Itza (although I could have looked at this tour guide from the same year, 1984, and see if I could spot locations in the guide). But no.
At any rate, James Woods plays the bookie and Rachel Ward, an Englishwoman, plays the girl.
She was in a number of films in the early 1980s, including Sharky’s Machine and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (which I was just thinking about), but she was also in the miniseries The Thorn Birds and worked mostly on television since.
To be honest, amongst Englishwomen of the era, I favor Emma Samms or Joan Collins.
