Victoria Bass Movies

This over-the-top star vehicle for box office draws Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone went through a series of directors before landing in the hands of Luis Llosa. Stallone stars as Ray Quick, a former CIA bomb expert now retired in Miami after an operation against a South American drug lord went horribly wrong, resulting in the death of a child. Ray is coaxed out of retirement by May Munro (Stone) to help her get revenge on the powerful organized crime family -- headed up by Joe Leon (Rod Steiger) and his son Tomas (Eric Roberts) -- that killed her parents years before. In the meantime, Ray's former partner Ned Trent (James Woods) is on the Leon family payroll and is seeking his own kind of revenge on Ray. As Ray executes Leon's soldiers one by one, his attraction to May boils over into a steamy encounter in the shower, a prelude to an explosive finale. Although director Llosa wisely kept his camera focused on his buff, semi-clad stars and the film's spectacular effects, the somewhat silly and incoherent plot resulted in a poor box office performance for The Specialist, the third disappointment in a row for Stone. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

Jack Dobson (James Belushi) is lying down, bleeding and dead, in a deserted clearing in the woods: "Yeah, that's me. No wife, no kid. Just one 9-millimeter bullet lodged in my chest." The voice from the corpse then introduces the audience to the area of his demise --Palm Beach, a town where everyone "leads three lives: public, private, and secret." Dobson is a homicide detective in Palm Beach who takes advantage of his position to bed a variety of women, while his brother Michael (William Russ) prepares to run for public office. One of Dobson's lovers is imported New Yorker Ellen (Lorraine Bracco). She sees Dobson leave a parking lot with a waitress and before long the waitress turns up dead. Dobson investigates the murder and determines that a serial killer is on the loose. When more women turn up dead with connections to Dobson, the finger of guilt points not only to Jack but also to his partner Steve (Tony Goldwyn), Steve's wife Beth (Faye Grant), and even his respectable senatorial candidate brother. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

In order to bring loan shark Jack "The Ripper" Lane (Wings Hauser) out in the open, the A-Team opens its own Irish pub, The Naked Lady. Disguised as pub owner Sean O'Shay, Hannibal (George Peppard) is apparently killed on orders from Lane, but it's actually a clever ploy to get inside the head villain's mansion (who'd suspect a corpse in a coffin?). Featured as the traditionally imperiled heroine is a pre-Northern Exposure Janine Turner. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi