Cop Target

Umberto Lenzi was perhaps the busiest Italian director of his generation. With more than 65 films on his repertoire, he was a pioneer, trendsetter, master-imitator and overall great entertainer! Just think of all the brilliant Poliziotesschi, Gialli and cannibal exploitation movies he made. By the time of the late 80s/early 90s, however, it looked as if Lenzi's batteries were running low. He was still making lots of movies, but they weren't so virulent, explosive and insane anymore. "Cop Target" is representative of the final Lenzi movies. True fans of his work will still enjoy it, but the vast majority of neutral viewers is likely to label it as dull, uninspired and redundant. Not me, though! It's a fun, albeit insignificant, actioner/thriller starring the great (late) Robert Ginty and Charles Napier in a sleazy supportive role. Plus, the story takes place in the Dominican Republic, in the sunny area of San Cristóbal, so Lenzi and his crew got at least a good vacation out of it!

Farley Wood is a loner Miami cop, assigned to escort a diplomate's widow and her daughter to a ceremony to honor her husband who supposedly got murdered whilst cleansing out the drug cartels of San Cristóbal. Wood and the widow, Deborah Kent, don't get along very well, so he remains in the background. Barely arrived at the island, the 8-year-old daughter is brutally kidnapped by drug lords. Wood quickly discovers that the dead diplomate wasn't the hero everybody claims he was, and that all authority figures on the island are utterly corrupted. There are a handful of great action sequences, like the beach kidnapping and the shootout at the abandoned factory, but admittedly there are slightly too many sequences with Ginty just sitting at a bar drinking Coca-Cola's and bickering with the widow. The most remarkable scene, in fact, is still at the beginning, when Farley prepares for his couple of days of leave and activates his "automatic cat-feeding machine" for his pet Arthur. I surely need to get one of those!