Cohen and Tate

Scoring a cult hit with The Hitcher, writer/director Eric Red sticks with the road movie format for this low-budget thriller about a boy who witnesses a gangland murder and gets kidnapped by a pair of professional hitmen, played by Roy Scheider and Adam Baldwin. High on humour and muscular doses of violence, the action is clumsily confined to the interior of a car, lending it a theatrical style which isn't helped by its concise time-scale. (The story unfolds over the course of one night.) Despite the best efforts of the always reliable Scheider, who emotes mean moodiness effortlessly, a lack of scope scuppers what could have been a real bottleneck of a film.