(There Are Spoilers) Doing his job tracking down fugitives from the law bounty hunter Sonny MacLaine dukes and shoots it out with three bad guys at the beginning of the movie "Standing Target".Sonny has them hauled off to jail before we get a chance to catch our breath and get our bearing to what the movie is leading up to.
With his girlfriend Casey pregnant Sonny's trying to be as sensitive as he can to her condition without letting it effect his job. Casey is also very apprehensive about Sonny being out looking for dangerous criminals to bring in. Since his dad who was also a bounty hunter was killed when Sonny was 10 years old and doesn't want her child like Sonny to grow up without a father.
One day Sonny is approached by this elderly couple Laslo & Eva Kukock who want him to find their fugitive son Jonish. Told by the couple that they put up their restaurant, The Little Oddesa, as bail and if he's not returned to the court very soon they lose what they worked all of their life to achieve. Sonny at first isn't that interested in finding the bail-jumper but later does track down Jonish only to find out that his parents are dead! It turns out that he's the nephew of Russian Mafia mob boss Tuzla, Len Doncheff,who grooming him to take over his crime organization. Jonish, played by Irish Patrick Gallagher, doesn't even look anywhere like his so-called white Russian parents Laslo & Eva looking more Mongolian then European, was he mistakenly switched at birth? It turns out that Sonny was tricked into finding Jonish by a faction of the Russian Mafia so they can knock him off and that's exactly what happens when Sonny finds him.
Uneven and somewhat boring action flick with Michael Dudikoff as Sonny MacLaine taking it on the chin as well as everywhere else from the bad guys and still coming back or more. Captured and kidnapped at least a half dozen times by the Russian mobsters Sonny keeps getting away, or is released by them, even though he's suspected of killing the mob boss' faired haired boy and hair-apparent Jonish.
It later turns out that Tuzla's hot headed and career climbing son Danny was behind Jonish's murder wanting to take over the organization himself after he does in both his dad, Tuzla, and his fellow Russian mobsters who are backing Jonish. Sonny gets help from Det. Racine and fellow ,but retired, bounty hunter Jake. Which ends with both of them getting shot by the Russians with Racine being killed.
Billy Dee Williams looks either bored or half-asleep as Det.Racine and only seems to be in the movie to lend it some creditability. And you can see the shock on Sonny's, or Dudikoff's, face when he's gunned down since it means that Dudikoff would now have to carry the movie all by himself.
Trying to stop the determined Danny from wiping out the Tuzla Mob Sonny again messes up and gets there, the big mob powwow in the country, too late to stop the bloodshed. But he does get his man Danny who seemed to be the only survivor of the shoot-out to face justice. Nothing made any sense in the movie even Sonny's girlfriend Casey being pregnant with her looking as flat as a washboard even at the very end of the film when she was about to give birth! You would have thought that the filmmakers would have at least stuffed a pillow under her blouse or did they just run out of money, by then, to buy one?
