Narrow Margin (1990)

The RKO screenplay, first filmed in 1955 and then this time in 1990, has all the ingredients of a classic thriller: a train carrying a witness to murder and thugs trying to identify her before she and her escort, a Deputy District Attorney played by Gene Hackman, get to Vancouver to testify against a Mr Big - but it all ends up silly, empty stuff with the action amounting to Hackman flinging himself sideways into a sleeping car or into a nook or into a quiet cargo hold as the inept baddies trawl up and down and up and down the train corridors ridiculously unable to pinpoint the car in which Anne Archer, the witness, sits either being breathless and scared in the dark or else engaged in long conversations with the DA somehow still able to stop by regularly for lengthy heart-to-hearts.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Patriot Games (1992)

Tom Clancy's brick is given the Hollywood treatment with Harrison Ford stepping into the role previously played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October, CIA agent and future PotUS Jack Ryan, a family man, patriot, and all-round impossibly good guy who here becomes the target of an IRA revenge plot that greatly endangers the lives of his beautifully expressive wife (Anne Archer) and daughter.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS