Posts
The 1986 action-thriller “Getting Even” is a moving picture testament to that moment in time when Dallas, Texas captured the imagination of and evoked a swaggering attitude endemic of Me Decade America. It was co-produced by Mike Liddle and Al Hill Jr., the latter the grandson of H.L. Hunt and heir to the Hunt Oil Company, meaning “Getting Even” was infused with oil money and something like an opportunity to transform Big D into a movie town. Indeed, it was filmed not only on location in Dallas but by utilizing Dallas equipment and locations to which the producers had access, as director Dwight H. Little explained in an interview with The Flashback Files. What’s more, Little has said he was hired as director specifically because he was non-union. That’s hilarious, evoking a certain kind of wildcatting spirit and goes a long way toward describing what “Getting Even” is: effectively a B-movie made with an A-movie attitude. And though I can’t speak to how it looked or played in a theater on February 28, 1986, alongside “Pretty in Pink,” of course, just how it came across 40 years later on VHS rip uploaded to YouTube, I gotta say, I was smitten, and which is why I give it my full-throated endorsement. Get even with modern Hollywood by skipping the theater this summer to stay home and watch “Getting Even” on YouTube!
In keeping with its era-specificity, “Getting Even” opens in Afghanistan where a one-time soldier turned soldier of fortune, Tag Taggar (Edward Albert), is pilfering lethal Russian nerve gas to transport back to Big D for analysis. It does not take long, however, for a wealthy rancher with a grudge against Yankees, King Kenderson (Joe Don Baker), to pilfer the nerve gas for himself, threatening to unleash it unless Tag coughs up an exorbitant ransom. Though the poster makes Tag look like Remo Williams, the characterization and Albert’s performance are anything but, more like a suave Robert Goulet filtered through Timothy Dalton’s James Bond. This is ironic given that Baker played the villain Timothy Dalton’s 1987 Bond movie “The Living Daylights,” though in “Getting Even” he lays his Lone Star heritage on thick, even as that heritage simultaneously makes for another of the movie’s weird ironies. Kenderson’s mission statement might literally be explicated as not messing with Texas, yet by threatening Dallas with the stolen gas, is he not, himself, in fact, messing with Texas?
Meh, who cares. The plot is but a thread on which to hang “Getting Even’s” myriad action scenes and running but a brisk 90 minutes, Little keeps those scenes coming at a good pace while utilizing so many action-thriller sound effects of grunts, screams, and machine gun fire to make for a hog-killin’ time. A car chase concludes on the Texas State Fairgrounds and involves a bad guy climbing the old Comet rollercoaster with the Dallas skyline as a backdrop, a delightful manifestation of Roger Ebert’s Climbing Killer theory, just as Tag deactivating a bomb at the top of Reunion Tower while King blasts away at him from a nearby hovering helicopter makes for a merry embodiment of Roger Ebert’s digital readout on the ticking time bomb cliché while also encapsulating the daredevil nature of 80s action moviemaking. “They were flying that (helicopter) thirty feet away from the tower,” Little told Flashback Files. “You could never shoot something like that today, not in a million years.” Yet, even as it frequently goes big, “Getting Even” is equally good at thinking small, like a sequence in which Tag is roped by some evil rodeo henchmen; I laughed out loud during that scene and I mean that as a compliment. Even better is the moment when Tag’s team runs a simulation of estimated casualties should the nerve gas be released. A helicopter hovering next to Reunion Tower is a whimsical reminder of the era, but so, too, are the dread-inducing graphics on a 1986 desktop computer.
