Year:  1987
Rating: 7.0

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This is my second Burt Reynolds film today. I had been planning to get to these in the next few months but his death spurred me to get to a few of them today. Malone was a lot better than I expected since I never hear anyone ever talk about this film. It is sort of Shane meets The Equalizer - though not as good as either. Reynolds gives his usual calm controlled performance. It fits him well.


Sometimes we all want to walk away from our job. It just gets to be too much or too tedious. But somethings you are not allowed to just walk away from - a dead body on your bed or your crying child - or in this case if you are a professional assassin who just can't pull the trigger any longer. His co-worker friend (Lauren Hutton) tells him the organization never lets anyone walk away. He says tough. Later of course they send her to kill him.


But trouble follows some people and it does with Malone like a revengeful shadow. Out in the middle of nowhere in a dying town his car breaks down. He takes it to a garage run by a father and his cute daughter but it will take a few days to fix. That is all the time he needs to get caught up in a rightwing white supremacist (Cliff Robertson) who is setting up militias all over the country and wants to force out all the townsfolks. He sends people to mess with the father and daughter. Big mistake. It builds slowly but has a good payoff.