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In a world where superheroes, sequels, horror (thankfully) and anything IP related are king, it seems as though the risqué original thriller has gone by the wayside. Over the past ten years or so you’d be hard pressed to find anything other than The Invisible Man, You Should Have Left, Gerald’s Game, Gone Girl, or Knock, Knock that really fit the mold (albeit with some finagling) and each of those is either tied to popular literature or skews closer to the horror genre.
But the original thriller thrived in the 1990s. Also thriving during this beautiful time in Hollywood were action movies featuring two adversaries face to face on the poster and/or movie cover. Movies like Face/Off, Point Break, Demolition Man, Universal Soldier, and Broken Arrow. 1992’s Unlawful Entry combines both of these elements with two heaping sides of the stalker and slasher horror subgenres. Which is why it’s one of my favorite films to recommend to people all these years later.
In the film, average businessman-dude Michael Carr (Kurt Russell) and his wife Karen (Madeleine Stowe) are attacked in their home in the middle of the night. Michael and the intruder fight for a bit before he escapes and puts a kitchen knife to Karen’s throat. He escapes and dumps her in the pool on his way out but the two are shaken up pretty badly. The entire situation leaves them each feeling violated and Michael wondering if he’s able to keep his wife safe despite his valiant attempt to do just that.
The next day, cops Pete (Ray Liotta) and Roy (Roger E. Mosley) show up to take the report and a fresh out of Goodfellas Liotta does a hell of a job creeping the hell out of us the moment he lays eyes on Karen. Michael doesn’t see it but we do… and you don’t ever want someone looking at your significant other that way. Michael and Karen, being the naïve suburban couple they are, assume this cop only wants to help when he personally comes over to install their new security system.
Pete really plays up the bachelor cop angle in front of the couple and Michael tries to act tough and impress him when he talks about what he’d do if he were to get his hands on their assailant. Michael tells him in one of those great Kurt Russell moments that he’d “rip his fuckin’ heart out” and Pete laughs in his face and says, “you’re a really scary guy!”
The dynamic between the two is crystal clear. Pete doesn’t take him seriously in the slightest and it sets the tone for the rest of the film.
Pete then invites Michael on a ride along. Michael goes, just to avoid being rude and gets a taste of just how twisted the streets of Los Angeles can be at night. Eventually, in a moment alone, Pete walks into a dilapidated house and back out, dragging with him the very man who broke into their house and assaulted his wife. Excitement turns to panic for Michael when Pete hands him a night stick and tells him to do what he promised: ”rip his fucking heart out.” In this moment, Pete really lets the monster out of the cage and shows Michael and all of us know just how psychotic he really is. But he’s a cop and you get a sense of the uphill battle that’s about to take place when Michael has a hard time convincing even his own wife that Pete is bad news.
What follows next is a series of escalating events where Pete begins to obsess over Karen. He finds reasons to show up unannounced, uses his nice guy lonely cop routine to take her for a cup of coffee, and delivers a speech about “what it means to be a cop” to her elementary school students. Meanwhile, systematically tearing Michael’s life apart so he can get him out of the way.
We’ve seen this plot before in other movies but what makes it so different in Unlawful Entry are both the performances of Liotta and Russell and the tightness of the script. First off, Ray Liotta is scary as hell when he wants to be. The way that he turns, at the flip of a switch, from nice guy to absolute psycho is something to behold. You can tell he truly believes his psychotic thoughts and it is frightening. Liotta actually had me thinking at several moments here what an amazing Joker he would have played at this point in his career.
On the flip side, Kurt Russell once again manages to make his lack of ego one of his pure strengths as an actor. Steven Seagal could never. Russell is completely game to play an underdog way over his head who’s outmatched and out experienced in every way by a man who desperately wants to take his wife from him. Sure, Russell can play the over-the-top action hero as well as anyone and he’s proven such with roles like Tango and Cash or the Escape From New York/LA films. He’s also willing to strip all that down and play a normal everyday guy who’s scared shitless but maybe willing to do what it takes when the moment calls for it. It’s a talent he also brought to movies like Breakdown and Executive Decision but none more impressive than here. You can really put yourself in this guy’s shoes and it makes the moments where he overcomes the odds all the more heart pounding and exciting.
There’s very few things in the world I love more than a movie that comes down to a bare-knuckled fist fight between the hero and the villain. Especially when the hero is the massive underdog ala Bloodsport, Broken Arrow or Lethal Weapon. The lead up here raises the stakes significantly, and it uses horror to do so.
With Michael supposedly in jail after Pete frames him by planting drugs in his home, Pete shows up at their home to claim Karen. She comes downstairs thinking her friend is making dinner and there stands Pete cooking dinner in her home as though he belonged there. Just completely violating every space he moves through. Karen is forced to play along to keep from angering him. Even as she finds the body of her best friend stuffed in the closet shelf Michael Myers style complete with a Black Christmas bag still covering her face. When Karen finally breaks kayfabe and escapes after Pete tries to sleep with her, his switch flips and he begins to violently assault her.
If American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman were just a bit more subtle of a character who also happened to be a Police Officer, he’d be Officer Pete Davis. So, when Michael makes his heroic appearance and gets the chance to cathartically do what he could not earlier in the film by saving his wife, he’s doing so facing a fully tilted madman at the end of his rope.
It’s hard to figure out why Unlawful Entry seems so unheralded. Considering it received generally favorable reviews, was a box office success and oh yeah, stars Kurt Russell and Ray fuckin’ Liotta at their arguable peaks. Perhaps the problem was the film was sandwiched in between each actor’s most memorable roles? For Russell, Unlawful Entry released in the middle of an amazing run that included Tango & Cash, Backdraft and Tombstone. For Liotta, it just a few years removed from Goodfellas and Field of Dreams.
Or it’s possible the movie is looked at as just another run of the mill, racy thriller from the ’90s. I’d argue Unlawful Entry is much more than that. Not only does the film boast a great cast and have a fun mix of subgenres but it’s written tighter than most of its genre brethren. Part of what makes the story so frightening is that Michael makes all the right decisions throughout the film. He makes a stand early on and tells Pete to his face to his face to “fuck off” and leave them alone when being polite wasn’t getting through to him. He reports him to the department. When that doesn’t work he smartly reaches out to his partner (Roger E. Mosley), who he knows to be a good person. Michael is a smart son of a bitch who simply cannot overcome the pull this cop has over the city, no matter what he tries. When you, as an audience, spend your time trying unsuccessfully to solve this problem for him, instead of yelling at the characters to do the obvious, you can really begin to put yourself in his shoes and feel that helplessness for yourself. Sure, it’s frustrating to watch Karen be so naïve to this man’s charms but given the state of mind she’s in, you can sympathize to a point. Michael finally overcomes her doubt with a great line when he pleads to his wife, “What’s it going to take to convince you? Me in a body bag?!”
These are the moments that make the script by George Putnam, John Katchmer and Lewis Colick so impressive.
Unlawful Entry is a movie that may be a run of the mill ’90s thriller on the surface but explores so much more. It covers masculinity and relationships in the same way as a movie like Straw Dogs, with the entertainment level of a thriller like The Fugitive or The Bodyguard. There’s also a lot of very realistic points about how we as a society can be susceptible to the power those in certain professions hold over us if they choose to use them to do evil. There’s even some nice subtle Wes Craven-esque observations about classism and like a Christmas star on the tree, it’s all topped off with an unhinged Ray Liotta in top form, stalking and slashing his way through the movie. Unlawful Entry remains forever underrated.
