Another Stakeout

Yet another genuinely scary case of the suits not quite realizing that sequels aren't necessarily warranted all the time. When I first caught the trailer for Another Stakeout, it didn't click. Surely this couldn't be a sequel to that tedious, manically unfunny buddy-cop movie from 1987. But of course, it is. Director John Badham (who hasn't done much of anything worth noting since Saturday Night Fever) takes another stab at the mismatched leads genre, apparently having learned little if anything from both the original Stakeout or his Michael J. Fox/James Woods pairing, The Hard Way. As Seattle detectives Lecce and Reimers, Dreyfuss and Estevez are joined by comedienne O'Donnell as Assistant D.A. Gina Garrett. Throwing a cranky woman (and her dog) into the already volatile mix might have sounded like a brilliant idea at first pitch, but O'Donnell's sizable talents as a comedienne bring little to Badham's convoluted storyline. In a nutshell, Lecce and Reimers are paired with O'Donnell's character to go undercover as a typical American family in order to track down Cathy Moriarty as a vanished woman needed by the state to testify against a Vegas mobster. Granted, both Dreyfuss and Estevez have the necessary charisma to drag most anything out of the gutter, but Badham sabotages his own film when he tries to include (unintentionally or otherwise) every action/comedy cliché thus far invented into one film. Like last year's Lethal Weapon 3 -- another ridiculously uninspired sequel -- Another Stakeout starts with a terrific bang and goes nowhere fast.