Overrated and overhyped

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Walter Lloyd (Gene Hackman) runs a Dallas lumber company. His son Chris (Matt Dillon) repairs stock cars and doesn't get along with him. His wife Donna travels to Paris but she goes missing. Father and son go off to look for her. Soon the stodgy businessman Walter turns into a man of action without Chris' knowledge. Walter is approached by two gun men with Donna's jewelry but he turns the table on them. He used to work for the CIA and reconnects with an old college Barney Taber (Josef Sommer). Chris saves his father from another gun attack and he finally comes clean to his son.Matt Dillon is overplaying the bratty know-it-all rebellious teenager role. He overplays everything by a little like when he is first told. Hackman is more of the lead and he's very solid. It's a worthwhile watch for Hackman fans. It goes to lesser seen location like Germany. It's a competent spy action thriller but Matt Dillon's character keeps annoying me with his arrogant ignorance. He's being shot at, his father is a secret spy, his mother is kidnapped and he's still chasing tail.

Ex-CIA agent, now operating a hardware business in Dallas, Texas, Walter Lloyd(Gene Hackman) finds that his wife Donna(Gayle Hunnicutt)has been kidnapped during her trip in Paris and must find her. Estranged son Chris(Matt Dillon)insists on joining him as they help keep each other stay alive in the midst of gunmen, working for mysterious sources,trying to kill them. His former partner Taber(Josef Sommer), now the head CIA man in Paris seems only too willing to help an old pal out. Clay(Guy Boyd)is Taber's right hand man trying to find out who would wish to kidnap Donna. The film follows Walter and Chris on their Euro journey often escaping certain peril in some rousing action sequences and near-death escapes. The one responsible for kidnapping Donna might be seeking revenge towards Walter for a CIA operation titled "Operation:Clean Sweep" which led to a family being slaughtered of one Cold War target that got away.Popcorn espionage thriller following Hackman and Dillon I thought was entertaining even if I didn't believe what the plot was selling for a minute. Syrupy bonding sequences between Hackman and Dillon just don't seem to work. Hackman, always the versatile actor, plays the role of hero with ease. The climax when it's revealed who was really behind the slaughter of a family..the one Hackman's Walter is being held accountable for..doesn't hold up well. I do not think the one responsible for such an act, carried out the way it was, would make himself look so guilty at such an inopportune time. Crackerjack bomb-diffusing sequence at the end is quite suspenseful, though.

How a talent like Gene Hackman ever got involved with this tripe I do not know. 1985 - not exactly a golden year for movies - maybe he just needed a job.The action is driven by an initial kidnapping and the plot turns on a series of twists that don't just stretch the bounds of possibility they snap it! How come everyone seems to know when Hackman will be arriving in a new city and are duly waiting for him, for example? And not once but repeatedly.Indeed, the basic premise of the movie insults the intelligence.Hackman's character argues that the person kidnapped will be kept alive until the kidnappers have their hands on him. Why does he think that? WHY??? It doesn't make ANY sense!! Especially, in the given circumstances.Add to this, the corny dialogue, Matt Dillon playing the dumbo (again!), and an actor who turns out to be the corrupt official/bad guy in every film I've ever seen him in (so no surprise twist there!) and you get a film that should have been thrown out at the development stage.

The plot of Target is quite reminiscint of Roman Polanski's Frantic which was released three years later. In the latter, Harrison Ford plays a doctor who's wife is kidnapped during their stay in Paris. It had a lot of good action sequences (like Harrison Ford dodging bullets on the roof of an apartment building) and a good, suspenseful story. In Target, Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon play father and son, Walter and Chris Lloyd. Walter's wife has been kidnapped during her visit to Paris and as both father and son will soon find out, it is related to Walter's former work in the C.I.A., something of which his son was never aware.The movie spends more time with the father-son bonding than it does in providing a very energetic story. This is because of the relationship between the characters, who don't have much in common. This leads to a lot of interruption in what could be good action to have those father-son moments.I think that is the downfall to what really could have been a good thriller. There were some good action scenes, especially car chases, but Walter and Chris seem to waste far too much time in this movie even though seem to remark about what an emergency it is to find Mrs. Lloyd and save her from the kidnappers. In 'Frantic,' Harrison Ford's character does a lot of bullet dodging and never seems to quit until he finds out what happened to his wife. In 'Target,' on the other hand, the scenes are often too slow moving despite the ability to be much better, given the motive for kidnapping Walter's wife in the first place. That's really a shame, too, given the great potential you have with an actor like Gene Hackman, who's proven he can do great things with action films (see The French Connection and Enemy of the State). If this is the kind of movie you're looking for, I'd recommend watching 'Frantic.'