Forgotten Film Friday (bonus Monday edition): The Package

A retrospective by Brooks Rich

Andrew Davis is one of my favorite directors and is someone I don't think gets the love they deserve. I assume he will get his own month one day. He has been covered on this blog before, also for Forgotten Film Friday, with the excellent '90s thriller A Perfect Murder. Today we will take a look at his sadly forgotten 1989 political thriller, The Package, which at first glance might seem like a pretty standard action film in the last year of the '80s, before Hollywood entered a bizarre transition period for a few years.

Gene Hackman is John Gallagher, an Army sergeant who is assigned with escorting a prisoner named Walter Henke, Tommy Lee Jones, overseas from Berlin to the United States. Gallagher is set up and Henke escapes and soon Gallagher is on the trail of a plot to start World War III, with Henke as a possible major player,

This film plays more like one of the paranoia thrillers from the '60s and '70s, films like The Manchurian Candidate and Three Days of the Condor, rather than big-budget action films around this time. The Package isn't just a standard action film of the eighties. There is a feeling of helplessness to the plot. In a standard film from this era the hero would just pick up a machine gun and single-handedly take down the bad guys, saving the day without getting a scratch on them. Not so in The Package. The villains always seem to be one step ahead of Gallagher. It's a fun but tense ride as we see all the pieces get put into place before everything is revealed to us.

The film is streaming on HBO right now. I think it's worth a look. Action thrillers like this aren't made like this anymore and if they are they are often starring D-list actors or A-listers who have given up and are just in it for the paycheck now.

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