The passage of time robs us of many things. I’m getting wrinkles, and I sleep with a lumbar support pillow because my back hurts. Death comes for us all in the end.
But one of the cruelest cuts was the passing of the trashy ’90s thriller. How dare Hollywood lose track of a genre that so effortlessly blended cheese and sleaze? We all deserve steamy, high-octane Lifetime movie plots with mid-range budgets and A-list actors. Whenever I’m in the doldrums and need taking out of myself, these are just what the doctor ordered.
Unlawful Entry, like many entries in the genre, is elevated by a strong antagonist: Ray Liotta’s Officer Pete Davis, whose charming, earnest facade hides—though not for long—the potential for tumultuous and all-consuming obsession.
Pete and his partner, Officer Ray Cole (Roger E. Mosley), take a report on a home invasion from a yuppies Karen (Madeleine Stowe) and Michael Carr (Kurt Russell). Pete is polite, professional, and helpful. He endears himself to the still-rattled Karen—who had a knife to her throat an hour ago and, in a telling detail, is still reflexively accommodating enough to offer to make everyone coffee—and to her husband.
As soon as he and Ray make it back to their car, however, Ray says, “I know what you’re doing.”
Something that shows up again and again with cop protagonists is the suspect you know is guilty, even though you can’t prove it. Unlawful Entry turns the tables. Pete is guilty. Every scene sees him sliding further into a possessive fervor over Karen Carr—but no one can prove it. Ray clocks it at once, though he underestimates it again and again: he has a cop’s instincts and a cop’s lack of will to decisively act against a fellow officer. Michael understands enough from the moment when Pete beats their home invasion suspect to a pulp and tries to convince him they should do it together: boys’ nights out.
This is not a subtle movie, but one of the intriguing ambiguities of Liotta’s performance is that this could be a breaking point in a previously genuine, if warped, regard for both Carrs. He’s testing to see if Michael is “worthy” of Karen. Since Michael’s regard for human life means he flunks the test, Pete can rid himself of any qualms. Michael is un-cop-like, therefore not man enough, therefore removable. And so, with a whole lot of institutional power behind him, he starts to work.
And no one can prove it.
Outside of a glorious bit of ordinary, intellectual ownage in the climax, Kurt Russell’s considerable charisma is a bit wasted here. The supporting cast is likewise flat, though I’d watch a whole movie about the infinite devotion of Michael’s lawyer, who puts up his own house so Michael can make bail. But Liotta is electric as, well, a Ray Liotta-type character, slowly letting Pete’s superficial control crack further and further to reveal the nest of poisonous snakes behind it, and Madeleine Stowe, who never quite had the career she deserved1, may be even better. She has the best and longest arc, and if that doesn’t necessarily come with the best and most dialogue, she shows everything on her face: fears, frustrations, and conflicting loyalties and impulses. The sequence near the end when she needs to play along with Pete’s infatuation has the gripping tension of a bomb disposal.
Unlawful Entry is streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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What did we watch?
Justified, Season Six, Episode Eight, “Dark as a Dungeon”
“We got the money. I have you. Everything else, I can replace.”
“Let’s just say, you’re puttin’ down roots, I’m pullin’ up. Sick of the past.”
“The past is a statement. The future is a question.”
This is the coolest line in the entire show so far.
I’m extremely amused by how the recap draws explicit attention to the thematic parallels between the generations; it made me recognise that the show is also putting Boyd through the question of ‘what does he want’ just as it is Raylan. Boyd has always wanted to be something special and larger than life, and he’s always been best as a pragmatist. You could never see him as a nine-to-five kind of guy the way Raylan, in his own roundabout way, is. One big score could be what he was looking for; action is what makes someone a legend, and one big action could be what he was really after.
Biggest Laugh: “What’s it been, fourteen years? I wasn’t even bald back then. Well, maybe a little.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “I weren’t around, but he would have put her in the cheapest piece of shit available. […] I put him in the cheapest piece of shit available.”
Top Ownage: “You wanted to get hit in the front, you shoulda run toward me.”
Elementary, “Tag – You’re Me!” – Two men who look like each other but are not related are murdered, and soon Holmes and Watson (back in the good graces of the NYPD) find they were brought together by an app that lets people find their dopplegangers. Only one of the murdered was using it to find someone to take a DNA test for him in an unsolved murder case. And both were killed in revenge. Interesting if messy, and also an examination of just what unfortunate things can be done with facial recognition software. Meanwhile Morland makes it clear he plans to stay in the city to help his son whether Sherlock wants it or not. We also learn that Morland is a master string puller, who is as likely to help the rainforest as to make sure it burns, utterly neutral. Not your typical antagonist.
Barney Miller, “Snow Job” – In the middle of a snowstorm, the detectives arrest a flasher. And a department store asks Wojo to make sure their receipts are watched overnight during a security guard strike. Ah, the vagaries of life in the 70s. All this while Barney is on the short list for a promotion, and when he doesn’t get it, oh how he slams the door. There’s nothing really special here yet but the chemistry between the cast members (this despite how poorly Gregory Sierra and Hal Linden got along), but it has its moments.
Hadestown: The Musical – Saw this with a pretty big crowd and it mostly went over like gangbusters, especially Eva Gray as Persephone. (Andre DeShields is simply impeccable as Hermes.) Did not expect how sung through this was, there’s barely any spoken dialogue or it’s recited, which adds to the feeling of a Greek myth retold for the modern age. This should fail and it kind of rips though I was not big on the main dancer choreography sometimes. What brought my friend with me to tears (I cried a lot myself) was specifically the bittersweet beauty of the ending, that yes, leftist movements and strikes and uprisings fail, life is a tragedy, but if we sing the song again, if we try again, maybe the song and the story can change.
Apparently the final time Carney was in the show in NYC, his parting gift was success. The story did indeed change.
Wait can you clarify the parting gift thing? I’m confused.
When Orpheus turns around, Eurydice is still there. This was a surprise for Carney. Of course it doesn’t fit how the end of the show goes, but what can you do?
Twilight Zone – caught up on “What You Need”, left my thoughts on last week’s article. Also watched “The Four of Us Are Dying”, which had one of those extremely high-concepts that I found I wasn’t quite engaged enough to accept. But I’ll get into that tomorrow.
Tales of Tomorrow, “What You Need” – this earlier adaptation of the same story was included as a blu-ray extra so I checked it out. The production values for this show are wonderfully clunky, particularly the opening credits and the host enthusiastically endorsing the sponsor’s sporting goods. I understand this to be a more faithful adaptation of the story: Serling swapped out the fortune-telling machine for a little old man with foresight, and the main character here is an unscrupulous journalist trying to debunk the guy’s business. The main story actually kinda worked for me better in this version although Serling added the scene with the other bar patrons getting “what they need” that was the highlight of the Twilight Zone version. Interesting to see two early sci-fi shows take on the same material, either way. I’d never heard of this show before but it turns out one of the original driving forces behind it was the sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon who is one of my favourites. A good chunk of the episodes are lost but it’s definitely tempting to check out a few of the others (this is the only one where it overlaps with Twilight Zone).
Oh, I’ll have to check out Tales of Tomorrow. I’m always so bad at remembering to watch Blu-ray special features.
Same, not sure why I was drawn in this time. Usually I file them in the same part of my brain as podcast Patreon stuff, I’m glad it’s there but there just isn’t enough time.
Looks like all the surviving episodes of Tales of Tomorrow are on archive.org. There are some big names in the cast list!
This is also one of a series of films that provide a sensationalist sense of unease about the police in the ’90s, particularly the LAPD. If you haven’t seen it, catch THE PROWLER, which, as far back as 1948, integrates the “creepy cop” archetype into a grimy domestic melodrama in the sleaziest James M. Cain tradition.
I have! I think I wrote that up back on The Solute. I really need to be better about moving those old articles over here. I also thought of that while watching this: it’s more disturbing that The Prowler keeps everything more recognizable as ordinary human behavior gone wrong, I think. Something noir is very good at.