City Heat
1984  PG  COMEDY  1h 37min
CAST— Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Jane Alexander, Madeline Kahn, Rip Torn, Irene Cara, Richard Roundtree, Tony Lo Bianco
MUSIC— Lennie Niehaus  DIRECTOR— Richard Benjamin

     Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds unite in this sometimes dull, sometimes ripping Prohibition-era action-comedy. Reynolds is a wise-cracking private eye, a onetime police detective, who constantly bickers with his ex-partner Eastwood. Reynolds’ current business partner (Richard Roundtree) turns out to be a shady character, extorting money from gangsters, playing one bad guy against another. Things don’t turn out well for him. Now Reynolds must protect himself from gangsters who believe him to be in on the late Roundtree’s racket. Eastwood reluctantly partners with Reynolds again, if only for an opportunity to regularly insult him (plus they need to save Reynolds’ squeeze from her poker-playing kidnappers, but that’s neither here nor there). Multiple MacGuffins make possible the antics herein, as the dynamic duo of Eastwood and Reynolds shoot at anything that moves (rarely injuring anything other than walls, as per the PG rating), smart off and generally have quite the macho ball. What story there is somewhat fails at grabbing one’s attention. More of an excuse to pair two bankable stars in a fairly entertaining yet unremarkable action hero parody. Average.
OUR RATING— ** ½