Kick ass soundtrack
Even though I love this film, it isn't overly a great movie. However, what makes it stand out is the suprisingly good soundtrack that it had. The music in this movie always gets me pumped up.
shareI liked the soundtrack also, but why all the dance hits for an action film?
shareFaith No More's "Epic", which featured prominently in the ads at the time, as well as during the explosion-heavy finale when the police car spins through the air and crashes down through that Rodeo drive storefront, is hardly a dance hit. The soundtrack to this was quite solid for its time. I guess when the movie tanked, there was no reason to release a CD.
shareFor every "Epic," there's a song by Janet Jackson, Cathy Dennis, Black Box, Sheena Easton, Keith Sweat, Tony Toni Tone. Seems like a lot more dance music than rock here.
shareI'll give you that, but I'm not sure it's something to hold against the film itself. It was set in Beverly Hills, after all, so I think a load of then-popular dance tunes (including several modest hits) wouldn't be out of place. I saw this in 1991, at a theatre no less, and I don't recall the music seeming out of place, and I wasn't particularly a fan of that kind of music back then. It just seemed like an acceptable part of the greater whole.
shareWow, you saw this in the theater? I'm impressed! I didn't even hear about it until I found it at a thrift store recently.
You are right that the dance songs weren't out of place for a 1991 police thriller. Films like "Beverly Hills Cop" (which I suspect inspired this to a point) and "Lethal Weapon" used a lot of dance tunes on their soundtracks. This film is very much a carryover from the '80s, when cop thrillers used a lot of club tunes.
I actually like a lot of dance music, but the songs from this era have not held up well in my opinion and drag this film down a bit — not that it's that great to begin with, but it's certainly entertaining.
I did indeed see this in a theater. I wrote reviews for the daily paper in my city at the time, and I had a tendency to favour the underdogs and one-weekers. The editors weren't always happy about that, but I thought it was only fair. The cinematography in TAKING reminded me a lot of LETHAL WEAPON, but I think the biggest influence was DIE HARD, which spawned quite a few "terrorists take over a . . . " movies post-1988, including this, the UNDER SIEGE movies, PASSENGER 57, TOY SOLDIERS, SUDDEN DEATH and a few others I'm definitely forgetting at the moment.
shareThat's great that you reviewed this for your local paper. I did movie reviews occasionally back in the day, but I wasn't very sure of myself and didn't have much guidance.
The art of the movie review seems to be fading in this digital age with so many bloggers, as are newspapers. I miss the day when smaller B-movies films like this still got a smattering of coverage in the local paper.