Stick
                                    
Director: Burt Reynolds
Year:  1985
Rating: 6.0
Sad news hearing Burt passed away. There are not many like him around any more. More a presence than an actor but for a bunch of years he was as big as they got and he had a lot of fun doing it for most of those years. When he was a star I can't say I saw many of his films; especially the good old boy ones - but he is great in Deliverance, Sharkey's Machine and I may be one of the few fans of The End, a comedy about him dying. Just recently I realized that there were a bunch of his films that I never have seen and wanted to - the tough guy ones mainly - and I recently saw Hustle and Semi-Tough and enjoyed his performance in both. As I have aged my appreciation of him and his type of films has increased though I have no idea why. Maybe a bit of nostalgia. Maybe because I am tired of the cookie-cutter actors that infest our action films now. In most of the films he seems to basically play the same character - himself - low-key, charming, self-deprecating, sleepy eyes - which is how he came across on his many talk show appearances. He put in his time in TV hell with a bunch of failed series - Riverboat which I saw a few episodes of, Hawk and Dan August - none of which are easy to get your hands on.  Deliverance though made him a film star which is where he belonged.



Through the 70's into the 80's he was huge. As he was the first to admit, he made some really crummy films but some good ones too. But a lot of box office power. And then it slowed down, went sour in his personal life, broke financially, hooked on pain killers after some accidents - but he came back from all that (Boogie Nights) and retained that wry smile that said this is all so much shit but I will come out here and tell some funny stories. A few months back I saw him on a recent talk show with some simpering host asking him really stupid demeaning questions and Burt just kept smiling. I wanted him to just pick up the creep and toss him through the camera. But no such luck. He probably needed the paycheck.



Stick is a pretty solid film - made at the end of his popular run, after City Heat where he got badly hurt on set. He directs it and does a good job of bringing Elmore Leonard's laid back Florida style to this thriller. Leonard also did the screenplay (though apparently he hated the final product). Leonard is always great at bringing a disparate group of low-lifes together into a comic crime mishmash. Stick gets his cool credentials soon after being released from prison by setting a man's pants on fire and smashing his face into the bar because he flirted with a much younger bar maid. His friend has a deal set up to transport illegal money and it goes very badly. Stick finds himself having to deal with a voodoo drug dealer, a drugged out drug dealer (Charles Durning in a horrible wig and I assume false eye brows ), a psychotic albino killer, a rich happy no taste boor (George Segal) and a beautiful oasis (Candice Bergen) in this shit storm. It is admittedly a bit too smooth, too casual, too predictable and never really feels as tense as it should because Reynolds never looks even mildly worried. But still it is Reynolds and that was enough for me today.