As Dogs Go, This One Is A Real Mongrel
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday July 30, 1998
BLACK DOG
Directed by Kevin Hooks
Written by William Mickelberry and Dan Vining
Rated M
Hoyts suburbs, Greater Union suburbs, Fairfield Twin
A SPECIALIST in plane, train and automobile action, director Kevin Hooks now gives us an erotic thriller in which the love objects are semi-trailers. His cameras prowl round their undercarriages, offering us fond close-ups of beefy tyres and upstanding radiator grilles, couplings and uncouplings, but what Hooks most enjoys is blowing up these multi-tonne monsters.
Over they go in one orgasmic display after another, bodies jack-knifing, engine parts flying, passing traffic scooped up and spat out, while amid the debris, a small band of human participants fights valiantly for the chance to utter a word or two. And what words they are.
Patrick Swayze is the star of Black Dog - cast as a trucker "who could drive an ice truck through Hell on the Fourth of July". And that's an example of the script getting literary.
This is a film which takes a fairly abstract view of speed and destruction. To Hooks and Co these elements have a deep and abiding fascination independent of anything that may or may or may not be going on around them. Hence, the script is not too picky about incidentals such as who, where and what for. Nor has it considered the fact that multiple pile-ups staged without narrative drive are about as exciting as a day in the life of your local carwash.
The plot is ludicrous - designed mainly to explain how good guy Swayze has been blackmailed into driving for a gang of gun-runners and how he's going to survive without spending the next century in jail to atone for the mayhem he is systematically creating on the highways of Georgia and North Carolina. Running interference are would-be hijackers after the guns, and filling the odd centimetre of soundtrack where the engines slow to a dull roar are country songs, one of them performed by Randy Travis, also appearing as an aspiring C & W singer who can't hold a tune. This, by the way, is the film's one joke.
Swayze looks decidedly more weathered since Ghost. His face has matured along John Wayne lines, the skin so taut across the cheekbones that you fancy any change of expression might entail a major operation. The closest he comes to a visible response is the slight moue of discomfort he produces when called upon to treat his own gunshot wound by cauterising it with flaming gunpowder.
Even so, his performance qualifies as unbridled emotionalism next to that of Brenda Strong, more familiar to Seinfeld fans as one of Elaine's betes noires, and looking here as if she has wandered onto the wrong set and is still looking for the exit.
But the rest of the cast ham it up with enthusiasm, and if offered the odd crumb of dialogue do their best to masticate it into a one-man show. Employed as number one villain, the rock star Meat Loaf, for instance, gives us maniacal cackles and curses and raves from the gospels. If he had a moustache, he'd be twirling it.
Clearly, he's having a great time. A pity about the rest of us.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald
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