No Place To Hide (1993)

Wonderful character development!

Absolutely Brilliant!

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Watched this because a friend of mine is a huge Kristofferson fan and had never even heard of this one so I thought i'd give it a shot. Yeah, there's a good reason neither of us had heard of it before, as it is so very not worth watching. Everything about this movie you have seen before, most likely on TV in an episode of some crime show. The only thing even remotely interesting here is unfortunately seeing O.J. Simpson in a wheelchair. He gets one very brief scene where he gets to convey his feelings about being confined to a wheelchair after being a football star, (he literally shrugs off his grief immediately after his dramatic monologue by saying "hey its no big deal") and then he gets to save Drew Barrymore from two guys with guns who are trying to break into the safe house where he's guarding her. (he dispatches one guy with a mallet!) I'm making this sound a lot more entertaining than it is, its really dreary. Its not even so bad its fun, its just dull and plodding. Kristofferson has lost his wife and daughter in a car accident years before the present and he gets a flashback scene where he gets to act out his rage that may be the one effective scene he has in the film. The rest of the time he's just barely holding himself awake enough to get through his scenes. Its not good.

Hey, folks, here's a blast from the past..."No Place To Hide" By Richard Harrington Washington Post Staff Writer April 19, 1993"No Place to Hide" is so bad it's not even any good. No guilty pleasures are to be found in its preposterously clumsy plot, or in the limp performance of Kris Kristofferson (someone check his pulse). Even Drew Barrymore regresses from the promise of "Guncrazy" by being forced to play a petulant 14-year-old caught up in a web of murder and intrigue. For both actors, this film is a triumph of underachievement.Barrymore plays Tinsel Hanley, whose ballerina sister Pamela (the always alluring Lydie Denier) has just become a backstage corpse de ballet during her dance company's rehearsal ("Swan Lake" or "Swan Song"?). The case falls into the lap of Detective Joe Garvey (the laconic Kristofferson, whose acting range is measured between squinting eyes and a grinding jaw). Looking for clues, Garvey comes across Tinsel: a petulant, selfish brat, who's now a target for an unknown attacker (who looks and acts suspiciously like The Shadow).Garvey is still suffering from the loss of his wife and daughter, several years earlier, to a drunk driver; the daughter, if still alive, would be about Tinsel's age. Do we detect a budding emotional subtext? Indeed, Garvey and Tinsel (both furiously resisting attachment) gradually develop a bond excruciatingly detailed in Tinsel's voiced-over diary entries. It's all very embarrassing, as is O.J. Simpson's wheelchair cameo (perhaps he was between takes on "The Naked Gun").Director Richard Danus, who beats his own script to a pulp, has no idea where to take any of this -- loose plot threads abound -- and the inevitable revelation of a secret society run by Dirty Harry elitists is simply ridiculous (if ever a film needed a satanic subplot, it's this one).In any number of confrontations, Kristofferson tells Barrymore to "Run, run!" and "Get out of here!" Take those as subliminal messages.

An adult film -- only those who have experienced what it might be like to lose one's family to the carelessness of a drunk driver might find a certain resonance with Kris Kristofferson's superb portrait of an embittered yet vulnerable detective. A version of the "I've got to put my life back together" story, the film comes perilously close to focusing too much on Drew Barrymore's teenage angst -- her rebellion against authority is not simply the typical teenager's, nor merely the result of being spoiled, as Kristofferson's detective finds out when she begins to cling to him out of real need. As a potential victim of the mysterious group that killed her sister, she needs protection; but as the discarded and abandoned orphan she has become, she needs the love and care of the father she never had. A film to be watched for intense and subtle performances by the two leads, and as well, for OJ Simpson's final film role as Kristofferson's physically disabled pal - a nice counterpart to to the emotionally crippled Barrymore-Kristofferson duo.

Before going any further, I should note that I caught this on cable, so it may have been, and probably was edited to tv. I rather think they may have trimmed some minor nudity. The movie starts off okay, but it quickly becomes a formula movie about a tough, but good-hearted cop in disgrace, and a teenage orphan in fear of her life, running from a super-secret underground organization that killed her sister. If this had been a made-for-tv movie, I would say it was a little better than average, as a big screen movie, it was somewhat weak. The problem is mainly in the run-of-the-mill story, not the acting or direction.