HOT PURSUIT. Directed by Steven Lisberger; written by Steven Lisberger and Steven Carabatsos; produced by Pierre David and Theodore R. Parvin for Paramount. Starring John Cusack and Wendy Gazelle. Rated PG-13 (language).
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Hot Pursuit is fair warning that summer, and summer movies, are nearly upon us. Hopefully the next few months will bring some better fare. But I feel sure that they'll also bring some worse.
Light, ridiculous, occasionally amusing and even, rarely, quite funny, it's an enjoyable enough little teen-pic.
The movie finds Dan (Cusack) stuck at school taking a make-up chemistry exam instead of jetting off to the Caribbean for spring break. His girlfriend Lori Cronenberg (Gazelle) and her family had invited him to cruise with them for 10 days.
Touched by Dan's despair at missing out on such a great vacation, the chemistry professor lets him off the hook. But Dan's just too late to catch Lori's plane at the airport. Thus begins the "pursuit" of the movie's title.
The hapless Dan makes all the wrong deciaions and keeps just a few steps behind the island-hopping Cronenbergs until the end—when he suddenly starts doing everything right and rescues them from a gang of boat hijackers.
The middle section of the movie is the best, with slapstick near misses and close calls occasionally reminiscent of vintage screwball chase comedies. A sequence involving three carefree Jamaicans who try to get Dan to lighten up—to no avail—is particularly good.
With a story as silly as Hot Pursuit' s, only good performances by actors caught up in the spirit of the thing can make it worthwhile. For the most part, the cast here fills the bill. Dan isn't as funny as Cusack's character in The Sure Thing, but the actor handles the demands of hie role well. Most of these involve physical stamina of some sort, with poor Dan rolling down overgrown hillsides, surviving a hurricane in a small sloop, plus doing a lot of just flat-out running.
Gazelle is pretty, if a little bland, as Lori, but her parents are well played by a couple of veterans: Monte Markham and Shelly Fabares. Robert Loggia is excellent as the sloop's captain, who acts like a pirate but has a heart of gold. The only problem with his performance is that there's not enough of it.
Hot Pursuit is certainly better than the last movie I saw starring Cusack, the very aptly named Better off Dead. (Ninety minutes of watching a test pattern would have been more rewarding than that tasteless bit of celluloid.) But it isn't nearly as good as his best, The Sure Thing. Cusack is a talented and appealing actor. I hope that someday he gets another vehicle written and directed as well as that one was.
May 27, 1987