With films that moved more freely between HIGH Art and LOW than nearly anyone else in Hollywood at the time, director Jonathan Kaplan, who died last year at 77, didn’t put up the usual neat career arc. His epitaph might read: Memorably Malleable. Here, he’s down with a Blaxploitation pic for Isaac Hayes as an ass-kickin’ Bounty Hunter working with partner Alan Weeks in violent pursuit of bail skippers. Hayes in big gun/love machine mode; Weeks making like Richard Pryor as sidekick. Both hitting the mark. The first half holds to larky fun (sex, bloody fights, snappy comeback lines, car chases), but the second half changes gears with the belated entrance of Yaphet Kotto. Not that it gets serious, we’re still pushing Blaxploitation tropes, but deadly consequences are suddenly in effect. Kotto taking over a revenge mission of Hayes’ enemies, backed by Nichelle Nichols’ rich avenging Madame; Kotto a more formidable antagonist and, as a actor, good as it gets in this sort of thing. Actually, Kotto good as it gets in just about anything he turned his hand to. (But as a Black actor at the time, he simply didn’t get the chance to show his full range often enough.) TURNER remains good fun of its type, and very well-handled by Kaplan given the low production values you expect with American International Pictures.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Quentin Tarantino’s Blaxploitation pastiche JACKIE BROWN/’97 probably got as much from this film as it did from the Pam Grier films of the ‘70s. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/jackie-brown-1997.html
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