Cohen and Tate (1988)

After brutally executing his parents (and their FBI bodyguards) who were held in protective custody on a farm in the middle of nowhere professional killers Cohen (Roy Scheider) and Tate (Adam Baldwin) kidnap little Travis Knight (Harley Cross), tasked to bring him to their mob bosses in Houston on what will turn out to be a very bad night ride.

Things really don’t go well at all for the killers, even before you realize that these two aren’t actually partners, but Tate’s someone the veteran mobster Cohen has very suddenly been ordered to partner up with, reminding the old man about the kind of pension plan you get as a mafia killer - that is, a bullet in the back of your head by your replacement. But even leaving this out, the two are the odd buddy movie couple from hell: Cohen’s the classic movie killer (he even dresses the part), loving things neat, clean and with exactly as much violence as needed, while Tate is an actual psychopath who exults in inflicting all kinds of suffering, and who would be the sort of serial killer the FBI grabs after his third victim because he’s just too sloppy. One’s a horrible human being; the other’s a monster.

There are other problems than just the extremely incompatible character types, though. For one, they soon enough learn from the radio (remember those?) that they may have killed little Travis’s mother and the FBI agents, but their main target, the father, somehow managed to survive. That’s not something their bosses will be happy about. Then there’s the matter of Travis. While he’s a child and certainly not a mastermind, he does his utmost to outwit the killers, using all his powers of dubious psychology and the kid superpower of being super annoying to drive an even greater wedge between the two killers.

At this stage in his career, before the stuff happened I don’t actually feel comfortable writing about here for various reasons (and which anyone can look up with a simple Google), writer/director Eric Red could do no – or at least very little - wrong, at this stage having scripted The Hitcher and Near Dark, and a bit later Blue Steel.

This is Red’s debut as a director, and by far his best film in that capacity. In a couple of scenes that are excised in quite a few versions of the film, it’s a shockingly brutal film too, yet this brutality is not just a director trying out how bloody he can get when killing off characters, it’s also establishing its characters as not the nice, clean kind of Hollywood killers but something probably closer to the real kind - nasty people doing terrible things to the innocent, something an audience needs to be reminded about because we are quite used to tragic, noble killers obsessed with guilt and blind women.

Here nothing and nobody’s so nice. Sure, compared with the horrible Tate, Cohen is the more sympathetic character, but the film never lets its audience forget he’s a better man only in comparison. In this context, it’s interesting to look at the way the film treats Travis, the theoretically innocent child, and certainly the character here a viewer is bound to sympathize with. Travis, as we encounter him, starts out as threatened and afraid, but the longer we spend time with him, the more he seems to be not as far away from Cohen and Tate as he should be, manipulating the men and often finding just as much joy in the effects of his needling and wheedling as Tate has when he drives over an animal. There is, I believe, a suggestion here that the difference between him and the killers is again only one of degrees, and that there might be something dark, destructive and violent lurking in even the picture of innocence, as if there’s something wrong with humanity itself. And here I wonder why the film wasn’t a success.

Which is nearly a crime, for apart from the quite brilliant characterisation carried by equally brilliant performances by Scheider (who is always as brilliant as a film lets him be), Baldwin (who realizes that even an unsubtle guy like Tate needs to be portrayed with subtlety) and Cross (who is that most curious of things, a child actor who seems to understand the dark undercurrents of what he’s tasked to play), the philosophical questions it throws at its audience, and the dark joy of watching a film that often plays like a buddy action movie gone very, very dark, the film is also simply brilliant at being a thriller and a suspense movie.

There are at least half a dozen suspense scenes in the traditional style – starting with the set-up to the murders of Travis’s parents, continuing through the tour de force that happens after he first escapes, and never truly stopping – that are text book effective, but much, much more exciting than the text book would suggest, turning this into a nail biter that for once actually deserves bringing up the ghost of old, terrible Mr Hitchcock. There’s a sense of drive and purpose to every shot, every movement of the actors, every line of dialogue, and the impression of watching the work of a director putting all he knows and understands and thinks about filmmaking and about life on screen in the best way possible for him.


It’s really quite the film, and it deserves to stand next to the two Red wrote for Kathryn Bigelow and The Hitcher, as one of the great achievements of genre filmmaking of its era.