Another Stakeout (1993)

the audience applauded

Thanks for the memories!

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A witness against the Mafia is being secretly held till the trial when an attempt on her life is made that kills several of her guards. She disappears and Bill and Chris are sent to, guess what? Another Stakeout. This one is arranged by the D.A.'s office and comes with Gina who is to keep an eye on them since the observation post is a vacation resort community in the home of a judge.And many times in the background, you can just make out John Badham trying to recapture the magic....The first Stakeout was a fresh, fun movie. It had a serious plot, but the comedy spark between the two leads made the film just that little more than a cop movie.Times must have been hard for the two stars and the director, because although the film is highly watchable, as soon as we get to the titular part of the film, it all seems to go downhill.Estevez and Dreyfuss are more or less separated for the majority of the film, and it's up to Rosie O' Donnell to try and get that chemistry from the first film. She doesn't.But the first twenty minutes is as good as the first film. There is an amazing explosion in the opening ten minutes, one that Jerry Bruckheimer should be envious of, and the initial chase scene with the two leads is as funny and as immature as you would expect.So the decision to separate the two is a little pointless, just as is the inclusion of Madeline Stowe returning to do nothing more than give Dreyfuss a little grief via the phone.But if you were a fan of the first film, there is a little bit of fun to be had...

first off I thought the movie was very funny , Emilio Estevez once again is very good,, Richard Dreyfus was OK,, I liked Miguel Ferrer's part as the hit-man assigned to the case. Rosie o donell on the other hand I just had to tune out, boy she can really get annoying. Dennis Farina on the other hand was very fun to watch , and had some good one liners to boot.. the plot isn't that bad,, state has to make a case,, the main witness is almost blown to pieces and proceeds to hideout somewhere far away,, but not far enough that our bad guys can't find her without some help.. some of the movie has flaws sure,, but I think mainly that it was made for laughs, and not so much plot points or stuff like that,, if there was a diff leading lady other than Rosie I would have rated it higher for sure.

I have this idea of police stakeouts being tiring, laborious things; endless hours, even days, of waiting and waiting for the slightest thing which may not even be of any necessity. I imagine a figure at the forefront of these investigations of immense patience, perhaps a rough but almost always methodical looking individual with the ability to sit and stare; to sit and watch; to ride the storm of sometimes absolutely nothing at all if it means wading out of the other end with something that'll help in the long run. Alas, 1993's Another Stakeout seems to think otherwise; an often loud, often brash and almost constantly unfunny movie dealing with the above like a Looney Tunes cartoon would the issue of hunting rabbits.The film is the sequel to a fun buddy comedy from a few years previously; a film entitled "Stakeout", and, if like me, you use minimal effort to read into where the brainstorming started in order to come up with such a title for this second film, you'll probably deduce that a third entry would've read something like: "YET Another Stakeout". Such a title, albeit hypothetical to a film that does not exist, conjures up a sense of the laborious; of the necessary although undesirable, and therein we deduce the gradual arc of the nature of both where these films MAY have gone, and where we're at with this particular entry. At the core of it is this comedic black hole is a threesome consisting of: Rosie O'Donnell; Emile Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss. Veterans of the first Stakeout film will identify two of the said three, Estevez and Dreyfuss, who respectively played police officers Bill Reimers and Chris Lecce. Veterans will also recall how well they combined in the middle of a tale which very gradually built into a menacing reality as Dreyfuss' character underwent a few changes in regards to his attitudes towards women and the true extent of their actual case blew wide open.These three are called upon to watch over a specific house in an easy-on-the-eye locale in the American city of Seattle; the reason being that it is home to a missing young woman named Luella Delano (Moriarty), whose testimony to an ugly recent incident involving innocents and police officers in Las Vegas caught up in a killing spree is paramount in nailing some crooks. In the meantime, however, the residence houses her parents: Dennis Farina's Brian O'Hara and his wife Pam (Strassman). The set up is simple: if she turns up at her family home, then the police have her and those who instigated the aforementioned Nevada chaos go down. But all of this is largely irrelevant for the duration of the film, as our leads slot into a facade of being the new next door neighbours and begin to engage in a series of wacky encounters built purely on the fact O'Donnell has brought her dog along with her and that Dreyfuss is a little miffed at being framed as his co-workers' husband/son as cover. There is a moment where the pseudo family are invited over for dinner, in what should be a centrepiece of comedy running on binary opposition and falsified stories (from both sides) as the O'Hara's try to cover up their daughter's situation and our leads disguise their policing backgrounds. But it runs aground; it doesn't get going. It begins to rely on that sharp pain one gets in the head when one devours ice cream too quickly.Depressingly, the film goes on to undo all of the good work from the first. Gone are the lessons Dreyfuss learnt, his relationship with Madeleine Stowe's Maria character, of whom was central to the stakeout in the first, is on the brink of terminating and Dreyfuss comes across as all of a sudden obnoxious and unlikeable. Gone too is any sort of rapport between the leads, with the majority of it just three people in a room shouting at each other. Where things worked in the first film, things collapse two-fold here; the sense that these people are at all qualified police officers worthy of the job they're on is suddenly all-but-lost, while the producer's decision to throw in O'Donnell reeks of a panic whereby going bigger and "better" is suddenly the solution to a problem that never existed.If ever there was an opportunity for a film of this ilk to drive forward with drama and heightened tension, it would be in a situation whereby the restricted view of an area we're aware the importance of is at the forefront of proceedings. In this scenario, a sense of cinema relies on facial expressions; "the image" and, if anything, a LACK of dialogue so as to not distract from the ensuing drama. One's mind boggles at a certain scene whereby Estevez charts the bathroom habits of his newly acquired targets, talking to himself in the process and using specific buzzwords more broadly linked to these excretal activities. It is quite incredible that a fully grown adult was even responsible for the construction of the sequence. And so, the film is a rank failure; one of those rare instances whereby the psychopath who pops up at the end to kill everyone actually gets our vote of approval to just do away with everyone. 2007 German film "The Lives of Others" was a pinnacle of sorts in its depiction of this clandestine world of observing and reporting; of swimming through the trouble of a delicate scenario; of getting under the skin and into the heads of those directly involved in both the observer and the observed. Here, Another Stakeout is the playground humour-ridden mess taking a premise not too dissimilar to the above and turning it into a recipe for unfunny chaos.

A dramatic murder-for-hire, quickly followed by a Keatonesque cops-and-robbers sequence introduce detectives Chris (Dreyfuss) a pathetic tough guy unable to commit to marriage and Bill (Estevez) the sidekick who is really a whole lot more emotionally secure. Much of the shtick is what makes this movie. Assistant D.A. Gina (Rosie O') is a lonely girl with a big job who really just wants to be a housewife entertaining friends. Rosie never breaks character, and there are moments her comedic timing has me rewinding a scene just to enjoy it again. Casting was great, with a fabulous ensemble of very good players, not one of them wasted. Director John Badham did well with Jim Kouf's memorable lines and I'd like to see them all do something else together...how about ANOTHER stakeout? Hey; third times a charm, right? Give this movie three views, and you'll find yourself getting your friends to watch it, too.