The video box looked unpromising, but the director has earned enough stripes to make this exercise worth a peek. (Or so I thought.) An Odd Squad is on the trail of an international assassin, after the villain knocks off innocent parties in most violent ways. The assassin himself (Carlos?) is such a banal youth, it was hard to accept him as the professional killer who was notorious at his game. Another moment difficult to accept was that our heroes run into a competing squad of spies after a common target. They're from Israel, and the target was being pursued in New Jersey. Shouldn't that have been the cue for our American heroes to put these foreign agents in the stir?

There was another mainstream film from a few years later (LOOSE CANNONS) where two American police detectives operating domestically ran into Mossad agents (led by a beautiful woman who would become the love interest), and then they teamed up... as if it was the most natural thing to do. What is the message here, some foreign countries are supposed to be such heroic allies that they are allowed free reign to blast away with their guns on U.S. soil?

The problem with this film is that the characters across the board are such soulless vehicles to carry the action forward that it's impossible to care for any of them. I only saw it hours ago, and already I'm forgetting entire scenes. Apparently William Friedkin was hoping to launch this idea as a series, but none of the networks bit. It's hard to understand why a once-great director would agree to sink so low.