Showing posts with label Mark Harmon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Harmon. Show all posts

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Only now does it occur to me... THE PRESIDIO (1988)

Only now does it occur to me...  that THE PRESIDIO is kind of a watered-down San Francisco buddy-cop/corrupt military investigation flick that is chiefly concerned with Meg Ryan/Mark Harmon fireside romance:

the hilarious daddy/daughter relationship between Meg Ryan and her red-blooded, football-and-Coors-loving American Army Colonel father, Sean Connery (!), who just happens to have a Scottish accent:
 
Daddy, you can't tell me not to date Mark Harmon

Yesh, I can...I've sheen SCHUMMER SCHOOL

and somehow portraying Mark Harmon as a Jean-Pierre Melville-style blasé badass.

Lookin' schnazzy in that High School letter jacket, bub

None of this is working in the least. The film's high-water mark is surely an all-too-brief sequence where a local meathead

decides to pick on Sean Connery at a seafood pub, which begins a (raw)bar-room brawl, ending with said meathead getting a faceful o' oysters!




Unused Connery one-liners: "I've got othah schellfish to fry!","Thish wohrld ish definitely not your oyschter, boy!"

After highlighting THE PRESIDIO's only praiseworthy moment, I must also point out its greatest crime: the complete and utter misuse of the brilliant character actress Jeanette "Vasquez from ALIENS" Goldstein,

who––though she is playing an MP and not a Space Marine––

certainly could have been given the opportunity for either character development or badassery, but in fact is given neither, 

shot dead a mere six minutes into the movie. I expected better from you, THE PRESIDIO. At least there's always THE ROCK when I need to scratch that "Sean Connery-in-San Francisco" itch.