The Package

Tommy Lee Jones is a fugitive being hunted by the police. Gene Hackman is a small town basketball player with a gift for the game. Pamela Grier is a lonely bail bondsman. John Heard gets left behind all alone in his house by his family. Dennis Franz is a redhead partnered with a hot head. I think that's backwards enough.

I totally buy Gene Hackman doing action hero shit, I will however never buy Dennis Franz the family man.

This one takes me back to the good ol' days of renting action/thriller VHS tapes at the local video store in the early 90s. Pure nostalgia, and pure bliss. Admittedly, it doesn't do too much to stand out, and it kinda plays like a poor man's "The Fugitive". Still, it is an easy-to-watch, entertaining flick that pits two of my favorite actors of that generation against each other. Hackman and Jones are such powerful, charismatic characters; I wish they had teamed up more often!

It's a good Cold War era political thriller. I thought the cast was well chosen. Joanna Cassidy did a really great job, but I couldn't figure out if she was Gene Hackman's ex-wife or his sister. The movie was a little too slow for my tastes, but the story kept me pretty interested. There really was no mystery to the plot, but I had a good time with the movie while it lasted. Definitely worth watching again.

The cast gives it some pizzazz, but basically this is a routine thriller

First of the Andrew Davis-Eddie Bo Smith Jr. collaborations. Competent, somewhat entertaining predecessor to Davis' similarly structured Fugitive and Chain Reaction with Chicago, not surprisingly, prominently featured.

Crudely effective political thriller. (Plot Formula 1-B: the military can't sit by and watch a couple of Gorbachev and Bush look-alikes sign a disarmament pact; they've got to assassinate somebody.) The storyline is decently complicated, but the pace (to say nothing of the camerawork) is too pell-mell to take much notice.

Underrated political thriller. Reminded me very much of some of the paranoia movies of the 70s, not to mention "The French Connection"; in any case a much more mature and serious genre movie than you expect from the late eighties. Fantastic cast.

Fine suspense thriller. Nifty surprises and violent plot twists add excitement.

Well-constructed political thriller, brilliantly staged in Chicago doubling for Berlin and Washington as well as itself. Hackman, sidekick Franz (playing a cop!), and Cassidy all turn in effective performances, and Jones is nervously wired as a clearly malevolent bad actor, though Heard is too lightweight to play the main heavy. Sometimes the gritty realism of the settings drags the drama down into the mundane, the dialog is undistinguished, and motivations are incalculable. Nifty, overlooked.

This feels like Andrew Davis's warm up to The Fugitive. Mostly forgettable, but seeing Gene Hackman on screen for much of the film makes it worth it.