Loose Cannons (1990) *

Directed by:  Bob Clark

Starring:  Gene Hackman, Dan Aykroyd, Robert Prosky, Nancy Travis, Dom Deluise

How could Bob Clark have directed A Christmas Story and then churn out a mess like Loose Cannons?    More often than not, Clark made movies closer to Loose Cannons in terms of quality than A Christmas Story.   This is a woeful miscalculation.   I can't imagine how the premise even sounded promising on paper, yet it attracted super talents like Gene Hackman and Dan Aykroyd to star in it.    It is easy to say they should have known better, but only they know what compelled them to make this film.    Thankfully, both moved on to bigger and better things.    Hackman even won a second Oscar two years after this film's release.    Unfortunately, the movie was released during Aykroyd's campaign for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy.    Did voters take one look at this dud and hold it against Aykroyd?   I couldn't say for certain, but I would like to see where he placed in the runner-up voting.   (Denzel Washington won for Glory by the way).

Loose Cannons stars Hackman as Mac Stern, a Washington DC cop investigating a series of murders of German nationals.   He is paired with a schizophrenic forensics expert named Ellis Fielding (Aykroyd) who morphs into various personalities when confronted with trauma or violence.    Well, these are not really even personalities, but impressions of characters in better movies.    Not one moment of Ellis' psychotic breaks are even the tiniest bit funny.    Ellis' issues are really nothing more than an excuse for Aykroyd to break into different voices and act oddly, with Hackman and bystanders looking on in stunned silence.    These episodes were likely to make even Robin Williams cringe.   This is usually his territory.   Was he too busy to bother with this movie?   

Ellis is a quiet, mild-mannered guy who is the nephew of Hackman's captain.    There's nepotism and then there is putting your career at stake for someone who clearly needs continued professional care.   In Loose Cannons, Ellis is allowed to jeopardize himself and others while pretending to be James Cagney or The Three Stooges.    Would it be too much to ask for Ellis to at least turn into Don Corleone?    That idea is better than anything in the entire movie, and I say this as modestly as possible. 

The reason behind the murders is to attempt to stop the distribution of a film in which a man named Von Metz (Prosky), who is due to become the next Chancellor of Germany, gets to know Adolf Hitler in the biblical sense and puts to rest the theories that Hitler's death wasn't a suicide after all.   The buyer is a sleazy porn king (DeLuise), who becomes a target of hitmen and must be protected by Mac and Ellis.   The dynamic between these three resembles Joe Pesci, Mel Gibson, and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon series, but without the fun or good humor.  

There are endless car chases, fights, and shootouts, all of which do nothing to enhance our enjoyment while simply adding screen time to stretch the film to feature length.   Hackman must have said to himself, "The chase I did in The French Connection was way more awesome."    There is not a character or plot to care about.    Loose Cannons is a dead zone and a waste of the talent involved.  

Hal Roach, Sr, a legendary director in the infancy of motion pictures was credited with saying, "Cut to the chase".    This was his advice to screenwriters and filmmakers who filled their movies with unnecessary dialogue and plot developments on their way to the climactic chase scene.    Roach likely would have advised the makers of Loose Cannons to "cut past the chase, the outcome, and get to the closing credits so we all can leave."    I learned the film was shot in 1988 and sat on the shelf before its early 1990 release.    No wonder. 

Years later, some negatives of Loose Cannons were found buried in an Alberta, Canada landfill.   The employee who discovered the pieces of film thought it was footage of a real murder, but investigators were able to conclude that the footage was simply negatives of the movie.    Dan Aykroyd commented, "The movie should have been left in the landfill where it belongs."    His words, not mine.