Stephen Kahan Movies

Detectives Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) reteamed for their fourth foray together in this buddy-cop action-comedy series based on characters created by Shane Black. With the passage of years, Murtagh's daughter Rianne (Traci Wolfe) is now about to upgrade Murtagh to grandfather status, while Riggs' relationship with Internal Affairs officer Lorna Cole (Rene Russo) means he'll become a proud papa. Elsewhere on the family front, Chinese triad members in Los Angeles smuggle families from the mainland, but this is only one item on the criminal agenda of triad leader Wah Sing Ku (Jet Li), who executes balletic martial arts maneuvers with blinding speed (fight sequences were staged by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen). The film opens with fire (when Riggs and Murtaugh encounter a flame-thrower in a bulletproof suit) and travels an entertaining popcorn plot path to a frightening, watery climax (which we won't reveal here). In between, Riggs and Murtaugh tackle the troublesome triads with an assist from wickedly witty, sharp-edged newcomer Lee Butters (Chris Rock) and private detective Leo Getz (Joe Pesci), the character first seen as a mob accountant in the second film of this highly popular series. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

Two unlikely friends -- a boy and a killer whale -- are reunited under potentially dangerous circumstances in this sequel to the successful family adventure Free Willy. Jesse (Jason James Richter) has finally found stability and contentment with his foster parents Glen and Annie Greenwood (Michael Madsen and Jayne Atkinson), but he is confronted with a new emotional challenge when his birth mother (a drug addict who abandoned him when he was young) dies, and his troubled half brother Elvis (Francis Capra) comes to live with the Greenwoods. Jesse also deals with new feelings when he develops a serious crush on Nadine (Mary Kate Schellhardt), the goddaughter of Randolph (August Schellenberg), an animal trainer at the theme park where Jesse helps out. But a much bigger problem is on the horizon when the safety of Willy, the killer whale he befriended and helped return to the wild, is threatened. An oil spill spoils the ocean environment where Willy and his family now live, and an unscrupulous owner of an oceanarium, Wilcox (M. Emmet Walsh), attempts to capture Willie and put him back into captivity as a performing attraction. While Free Willy featured Keiko, a trained whale who (ironically) was living in captivity when the film was shot, Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home instead utilized mechanical models and digital animation to bring "Willy" to life. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

They say you can't miss what you never had, but one woman wants to put that idea to the test in this comedy. Kathy Whiting (Harley Jane Kozak) is a housewife and mother of two who enjoys a happy but unexciting relationship with her husband Peter (Bill Pullman), while her best friend Emily Embrey (Elizabeth McGovern) runs an art gallery and is living with a good-looking artist, Elliot Fowler (Brad Pitt). Both women feel that a sense of romantic adventure is missing from their lives, and Kathy has never been able to forget Tom Andrews (Ken Wahl), a football player that she was in love with in high school but never slept with (she was saving herself for marriage at the time). So when Kathy learns that Tom is living in Denver, and Emily will be going there on business soon, she asks Emily for a very big favor: find Tom, seduce him, and then give her a full report on what she's been wondering about these 15 years since graduation. The Favor was filmed in 1991 but went unreleased until 1994, after A River Runs Through It and Legends of the Fall had made fourth-billed Brad Pitt a box-office draw. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The plot of this action film begins in 1996, with Los Angeles in a violence-crazed conflagration. One of the LAPD's most notorious cops, John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), known as "the demolition man," is in hot pursuit of blonde-haired psychopath Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), who is so nasty he even kills sometimes just because he feels cranky. John captures Simon, but not before Simon kills innocent hostages. John is blamed for the deaths of the hostages, and both he and Simon are cryogenically frozen to remove their brand of ultra-violence from a society that is simply just too violent. The film shifts to the future world of 2032, where Los Angeles has become a megalopolis called San Angeles. There is no poverty, Arnold Schwarzenegger was (at one time) president of the United States, and Taco Bell is the sole survivor of the Franchise Wars. Into this peaceful and bland society, Simon is summarily defrosted by reigning benevolent dictator Dr. Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne) to have Simon murder Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary), the leader of a group of underground rebels. But Cocteau bites off more than he can chew when the melted-down Simon proceeds to go on a murder-and-looting spree. Reluctantly, Cocteau defrosts John to hunt down his old adversary. As John adjusts to self-driving cars and having sex wearing helmets, he pairs up with Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), a bored cop with a nostalgic fascination for 20th-century culture. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Two brothers are the victims of their widowed mother's violent drunkard husband who spares no rod with the youngest brother. Reverting to a world of make-believe, they imagine that their Radio Flyer wagon can fly and that in it they can escape their tormenting stepfather. This film deals in an almost make-believe manner with the serious issue of child abuse. It is narrated by Tom Hanks. ~ All Movie Guide

This special effects-heavy science fiction sequel moves the action from the first film's Amazon forest to the urban jungle of L.A. Danny Glover stars as Lt. Mike Harrigan, an LAPD detective baffled by his latest case, the ritualistic slaughter of several drug dealers by a devastating killer who leaves no traces. As Harrigan and his partners, Danny Archuletta (Ruben Blades), Leona Cantrell (Maria Conchita Alonso), and Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton), try to figure out who or what killed the criminals, FBI investigator Stephen Keyes (Gary Busey) attempts to warn the team away from investigating further. When two of his team are killed in a particularly grisly way, Harrigan uncovers the truth -- their quarry is an alien creature that hunts humans for sport. Attracted to violence, its latest choice of prey is gun-toting Jamaican drug dealers. Keyes and his team know all about the nasty extraterrestrial and its bloody pastime because they've been studying it for ten years, and they've come up with a possible means of dispatching the beast. When that plan backfires, however, it comes down to Harrigan and an extremely irritated otherworldly foe, slugging it out in a rooftop confrontation. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Lethal Weapon 2 reteams Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as, respectively, "loose cannon" LA detective Martin Riggs and Riggs' partner, the cautious family man Roger Murtaugh. The villain this time is a South African diplomat (Joss Ackland) who doubles as a drug dealer. Though Riggs knows what's going on thanks to characterless character witness Joe Pesci, he can't touch the villain because of "diplomatic immunity." After perils too numerous to mention, Riggs and Murtaugh shoot it out with the heavies on the deck of a South African cargo ship. Lethal Weapon 2, of course, contains as one of its comic high-points a now famous suspense scene: Mel Gibson agonizingly attempting to extricate a terrified Danny Glover from a booby-trapped toilet seat. Gibson, Glover, Donner and Joe Pesci would be reunited three years later for Lethal Weapon 3 and in 1998 for Lethal Weapon 4. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A darkly comic and surreal contemporization of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, this effects-heavy Bill Murray holiday vehicle from 1988 sees the former SNL funnyman assuming the role of television executive Frank Cross, the meanest and most depraved man on earth. Cross will stoop to unheard of levels to increase his network's ratings -- even if it means mounting outrageous programs to retain an audience, such as "Robert Goulet's Cajun Christmas" and Lee Majors in "The Night the Reindeer Died," with an AK-47-toting Santa. Cross plots his foulest move, however, for the Christmas holiday, when he will force his office staff to mount a live production of A Christmas Carol on national television -- and thus work through Christmas Eve. Cross's life is turned upside down with visits from three ghosts: a craggy-faced cabbie known as The Ghost of Christmas Past (David Johansen); the sugar-plum fairy Ghost of Christmas Present (Carol Kane) (who gets her jollies by bonking Frank across the face with a toaster oven); and, eventually, the caped, headless Ghost of Christmas Future, who will send Frank sliding into a crematory oven -- just before he gives the sleazoid one last chance to redeem himself. Along the way, the spirits carry Frank to scenes from his past, present, and future (per Scrooge) and impart a glimpse of how he became so thoroughly rotten. The radiant Karen Allen co-stars as Frank's girlfriend, Claire Phillips, and the film packs in cameos from countless celebrities -- among them, Mary Lou Retton, John Houseman, Jamie Farr, and, in a truly grisly and tasteless bit, John Forsythe. Richard Donner directs, from a script credited to the late Michael O'Donoghue and Mitch Glazer. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Much of the original cast from the popular television series Police Story reunited for this edgy drama, in which the detectives search for a killer loose on the roads. This entry was one of several TV-movies in the late 1980s to feature the familiar cast in the Police Story format. ~ Bernadette McCallion, All Movie Guide

In The Toy, director Richard Donner and screenwriter Carol Sobieski update the 1976 Pierre Richard farce Le Jouet as a vehicle for comedian Richard Pryor. Pryor stars as out-of-work journalist Jack Brown, who's hit with the sudden realization that his idle book writing won't pay a 10,000-dollar sum necessary to keep his house from going to auction. Desperate, he is improbably hired as a cleaning lady in the offices of rich businessman and newspaper magnate U.S. Bates (Jackie Gleason). Running afoul of Bates' quick temper, Jack gets the axe, but is later spotted goofing around in a Bates-owned toy store by Bates' bratty son, Eric (Scott Schwartz), who's spending his annual week together with his estranged father. Taking his father's offer that he may have "anything in the store" quite literally, the spoiled kid asks for Jack as his personal toy for the week. Initially unwilling to be treated as a possession, Jack soon agrees after Bates offers to pay him enough to climb out of debt. When Eric's idea of fun includes dumping buckets of booby-trapped oatmeal on Jack's head and riding down the stairs of his father's mansion with Jack riding shotgun in a miniature car, it tests both Jack's patience and his resolve. But Jack discovers that Bates is ignoring Eric, which strengthens the bond between them and prompts them to seek revenge on the big jerk. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide

Richard Donner's big-budget blockbuster Superman: The Movie is an immensely entertaining recounting of the origin of the famous comic book character. Opening on Krypton (where Marlon Brando plays Superman's father), the film follows the Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve) as he's sent to Earth where he develops his alter-ego Clark Kent and is raised by a Midwestern family. In no time, the movie has run through his teenage years, and Clark gets a job at the Daily Planet, where he is a news reporter. It's there that he falls in love with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), who is already in love with Superman. But the love story is quickly sidetracked once the villainous Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) launches a diabolical plan to conquer the world and kill Superman. Superman: The Movie is filled with action, special effects and a surprising amount of humor. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide