Sunset Grill

Customer Reviews:

Unpleasant, confused crime movie.......2007-07-11

The "hero" of this crime movie is a foul-mouthed, beat-up, cigarette-always-hanging-out-of-the-mouth, booze-guzzling, bug-eating, cop-turned-low-life-P.I., played by Peter Weller. The character is supposedly redeemed by his basic honesty, feelings toward his wife, and rapport with the down-and-out.

Weller's character is estranged from his wife, played by Alexandra Paul in a couple of brief and shallow scenes. This is in part because as a cop he unwittingly set up a sting on her father concerning a savings-and-loan fraud, which appears to have led the man to hang himself. The wife owns a seedy-neighborhood Southern California bar and grill, which has some employees from south of the border.

The movie begins with a confusing and violent scene in Mexico, in which one man is shot in the head and the face of another (an employee of the bar and grill, I think) is crushed by hand by a tall, burly blonde henchman. When the thugs come looking for a letter that the employee might have sent back to the grill, Weller's wife meets the same fate.

At the bottom of it all is what turns out to be some weird organ harvesting scheme using illegal Mexican immigrants. Just about everyone in the movie seems to have been involved somehow in this ill-defined, gruesome plot. This includes: Stacy Keach, hamming it up as drawling rich guy Shelgrove, who lives in a mansion, owns a firing range that seems to double as a bar, and gives lengthy expositions on Mayan culture; Lori Singer, as the stereotypical breathy-voiced, brooding blonde knockout, at one moment politely business-like, at another a steamy seductress, and at the next cool-and-hard-as-nails, who apparently manages Shelgrove's shooting range and has sometime in the past been an organ recipient (though nothing about this character, or her relationship to anyone else, is made clear); John Rhys Davies as a wholly corrupt, abusive INS agent; a sweaty, neurotic surgeon; Weller's utterly ineffectual cop pal who courted his wife; and even Weller's deceased father-in-law, who took an interest in Mexican immigrants.

There is some mystery and detection, the cast includes some recognizable names, and Weller and Keach are passable. But no one is displayed to good effect. The characters, story, and settings are thin, murky, ugly, and uninvolving. As it unfolds, the story is choppy and obscure, not crisp and dramatic. Despite the grim subject matter, the movie has an incongruous tongue-in-cheek feel, for example, in how in how it presents Weller, Rhys Davis, Shelgrove, and the doctor.

Weller's uncanny ability, while mumbling and shambling along, to keep going through all the smoke, booze, bruises, bullets, complications, and adversaries to get to the bottom of it all is increasingly implausible. A prime example is the scene in which Weller, wounded, drugged senseless, and lying on the doctor's operating table (and why would the bad guys go through this trouble instead of just shooting or strangling him, as they do to everyone else?), pulls himself up, stumbles away, and fights the blonde muscle man to the death.

The movie's way of resolving everything is to kill off characters (good and bad) in one brutal manner or another, including, most wastefully, a female INS agent. Its overall ugliness seems to be done for cheap shock-effect rather than to convey any larger meaning, its style a substitute for telling a clear, full, and effective story. Some gratuitous nudity and tasteless "comic relief," thrown in for good measure, do not help.

Other reviews have rightly pegged Weller's character as a "stumblebum with a BB gun" and the movie as a "muddled tale of slobs and sex." This is an unpleasant, confusing, poorly developed, unsatisfying movie.

Grill This Loser.......2004-03-10

Time to review the 1992 crime drama "Sunset Grill" starring Peter Weller and Lori Sanger. The letterbox states, "For years private eye Ryder Hart lived on the edge. Tonight he'll cross the line."

Well...Ryder (Weller) crosses the line and in the process we're all witnesses to one of the most boring crime flicks on Planet Earth.

Peter Weller walks around for 90 minutes beat-up, bruised and bleeding like a mutt that's just been run over by a semi.

Lori Sanger looks like a wax mannequin at Tussaud's House of Horrors and her acting could be recreated in any viable sound software program.

Grill this one at sunset. I mean (to get to the point)...take the DVD and throw it into your barbecue grill as a flame starter.

Peter, whom I admired prior to this embarrassment, is no longer a "Weller" in my book...he's now a "Worser".

Atzecs?.......2000-10-01

Sunset Grill Nude scenes from three different women: Lori Singer, Alexandra Paul, Sandra Wild. All three actresses got naked, but in the case of Paul and Singer, the scenes were cut tastefully to avoid pubic exposure. In fact, Singer got up from one energetic love scene where the lovers were obviously in the later stages of intercourse, the director cut away too slowly, and you could see that she was wearing a thong!

As for the movie, well, let me tell you. In the Olympics they won't let a 150 pound man wrestle against a 170 pound man because it just isn't a fair match. But in the movies, one drunken stumblebum private eye armed with a BB gun can overcome all of the following:

1. Several corrupt INS officials

2. The Mexican border federales.

3. The world's richest man and several doctors, who are running a scam to use illegal immigrants as unwilling heart and liver donors.

4. The world's richest man's connections, which "go so high up the ladder God can't see the top"

5. Thugs who look like a cross between Dolph Lundgren and Andre the Giant, and are better armed than the Iraqi army.

6. Treacherous girlfriends.

7. Incompetent associates.

8. Sarcastic bartenders.

Very realistic movie.

Stacy Keach plays, or maybe I should say overplays, the world's richest man, and he says that ripping hearts out of living victims is OK because:

* They are doing it for a good cause, to give the gift of life to senior members of the Republican Party and other equally important members of society.

* The Aztecs did it, and these victims are descended from the Aztecs, so they are culturally prepared for it.

Description

TRIPLE THE SUSPENSE... TRIPLE THE STAR POWER! A TOUGH PRIVATE EYE INVESTIGATING HIS WIFE'S BRUTAL MURDER UNCOVERS A BIZARRE TRAIL OF GRISLY KILLINGS AND SHOCKING SECRETS IN SUNSET GRILL. TWO ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IN THE TENSION-FILLED SCORPION SPRING FOOLISHLY GIVE A RIDE TO A DESPERATE DRUG RUNNER AND HIS HOSTAGE. A SHABBY DESERT MOTEL IS THE LOCATION FOR LUST AND MURDER AS A PAIR OF BROTHERS ARE DRAWN TO A PROVOCATIVE WOMAN WHOSE CAR HAS BROKEN DOWN IN EYE OF THE STORM.

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