Rush (1991)

Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck. Starring Jason Patric, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sam Elliott, Max Perlich, Tony Frank, Gregg Allman, William Sadler. [R]

Undercover narcotics officer Jim Raynor (Patric), light years away from blasting Zerg hostiles in the Koprulu sector, indoctrinates new partner, Kristen Cates (Leigh), to his dangerous world, one where each must be able to trust and depend on each other without reservation, and where believability within the drug trade requires a willingness to use drugs in the presence of the dealers on whom they’re trying to build cases. Predictably, this leads to 1) them becoming so intimately close they enter into a sexual relationship, and 2) they each get hooked on the narcotics they’re trying to get off the streets. Although the acting and scene-for-scene craft of tension and scuzzy atmosphere are mostly effective, the premise—despite being loosely based on a real case from the 1970s—is hard to buy as presented (the “undercovers” sometimes stick out as badly as Starsky & Hutch), and the final act stacks one implausibility after another onto each other in order to arrive at a viscerally “satisfying” finale. The chief antagonist, played by Gregg Allman in an objectively humorous bit of casting, is entirely symbolic, drifting like a silent specter in between the bookending sequences that give him his only terse lines of dialogue, but the script doesn’t take the time to properly build him up as a real-life boogeyman. The searing drug fix scenes aren’t hard to watch so much because they’re despairing, but because they’re treated as overwrought interludes of redundant degradation while Eric Clapton’s bluesy guitar wails on the soundtrack. Speaking of Clapton, this was the movie that gave the world the love-it-or-hate-it soft rock ballad “Tears in Heaven”. Only feature directing credit for Lini Zanuck, wife of Richard D. (who co-produced).

57/100