What Daddy Did in the Cold War

By Richard Schickel

All right kids, you're excused. Why don't you run and see if Steven Spielberg can come out and play? Or maybe little Arnie Schwarzenegger? Target is a dream of glory strictly for grownups.

You remember grownups, don't you? Used to see them in the movies all the time. And they can still be found occasionally in real life. They are the ones who work in dumb places like the lumberyard, always remember to buckle their seat belts and regard an afternoon fishing at the lake as entertainment every bit the equal of Miami Vice. They are also, of course, the ones you can't imagine having sex, an interesting past or competence in any field of endeavor that is remotely amusing, let alone thrilling.

In short, a grownup is a creature very much resembling Walter Lloyd (Gene Hackman), whose patient efforts to gain the respect of his son Chris (Matt Dillon) elicit nothing more than a succession of shrugs and silences. What can Dad possibly know about the soul of a lad who wants to be a race-car driver?

More than anyone might suspect, as it turns out, when Mrs. Lloyd (Gayle Hunnicutt), vacationing in Europe, is abducted, and father and son set out to rescue her. For Walter once led a secret life as a CIA agent, and the kidnaping of his wife is an act of belated (and misdirected) revenge for an operation that cost the lives of a Communist master-spy's family two decades earlier. The Lloyds have not reclaimed their luggage at the Paris airport before Walter is forced to dispatch a thug sent to murder him. In a matter of hours he is giving Junior, who has the innocent courage, clumsiness and distractibility of a puppy, a much needed basic course in espionage field operations. It is clear that being a spy is rather like riding a bicycle: once you have learned how, you never forget.

Watching Walter Lloyd conduct a high-speed car chase or evade pursuers by diving off a bridge into the icy waters of Hamburg harbor is, if you are a gentleman of a certain age, roughly equivalent to watching Phil Niekro win his 300th game. It extends the effective life of one's youthful fantasies a few minutes more. But while stimulating that harmless activity, Target also encourages a modest re-examination of the ideological scaffolding on which the older generation erected some of its dreamwork.

Inevitably, Walter's return to the scenes of old cold war crimes evokes the mood and manner of '60s pop spy epics like, say, The Ipcress File. But Director Penn, whose most successful works in that period were counterculture icons like Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, is not about to be nostalgic about his former competition. Target is a deadpan satire on the old cloak-and-dagger conventions almost to the end, at which point Penn cannot resist staging with self-conscious luridness a scene in which Walter must deal with a particularly sadistic bomb threat.

One might wish that Penn and the writers had avoided the reigning contemporary cliche of their genre, which insists on turning American spooks into villains, their enemies into misunderstood humanitarians. It is an irony that has grown tiresome with overuse.

But Hackman's work is subtly alive to all the complexities of his character and his situation, and his path is strewn with good supporting actors. One cannot help offering a chortling cheer to a movie that throws demographic caution to the wind in order to celebrate geezer power. --By Richard Schickel