The renegade wants $200k... in 1988. Ten years before Austin Powers, this movie one ups it. Or one downs it. At least the renegade isn't greedy. Or intelligent.
The plot is all so whacky, nearly defies belief. Inexplicable motives by the bad guy, and hilarious incompetence by the US and USSR.
Considering there was literally only one FBI guy assigned to this case- involving over half a dozen Russian agents in the US- , they probably didn't want you to sweat the plot too much. Like a lengthy sequence where a pickup truck struggles to chase a commuter train. Hmm, where might that train be going? Gee, maybe farther down the track?
The Russian agent hangs out in the FBI agent's house so that he can capture Phoenix's character to use as leverage to force Phoenix's sleeper Russian agent parents to give the money to the renegade. Good thing the FBI agent didn't show up a few minutes earlier! It's a painfully glaring example of a script needing to move some characters somewhere else but can't think of any plausible way to make it happen.
And why exactly did the Russian agent keep Phoenix hostage after the handoff went south? Was he really trying to sneak him off to Russia? Despite Phoenix (who IS American) ultimately rebelling... oh, and the fact the FBI WOULD KNOW?
Of course not. Once again, it's painfully clunky script mechanics to get the characters together. Ugh.
Then there's a shootout/hostage situation on a pedestrian bridge at the San Ysidro border crossing, but nobody seems to notice. Yup.
What throws it for a loop is that most of the script would have played better as comedy or satire, but almost all the actors are playing it like a hard core drama. And the acting is really quite solid. Poitier and Phoenix have great chemistry here.
You could practically make a drinking game from how many times Poitier looks at the photos of the parents.
The script is just unbelievably ridiculous. The core of the sleeper agents with an unknowing son was nifty, as well as how this was discovered, by the kid applying to the Air Force without his parents knowing, triggering a background check. But wow did it go south from there.
Considering the renegade Soviet agent is killing people left and right, you'd think there would be some behind the scenes coordination between the US and Russians to solve the problem.
