One of the year's more curious misfires, COMPANY BUSINESS, a post-Cold-War comedy-thriller, tries to replace the treachery of nations with the treachery of men, achieving only middling results.
Sam Boyd (Gene Hackman) is a retired CIA operative hanging on by his fingernails in the private investigation racket. Working for a cosmetics company, he obtains--at risk of life and limb--proof of corporate espionage only to find himself bested by a computer nerd who obtained better proof just
by breaking into the offending company's data banks. Still, Boyd is less than thrilled when his erstwhile employer calls him back for one more caper. Running the operation are Colonel Grissom (Terry O'Quinn) and CIA honcho Elliot Jaffe (Kurtwood Smith), who inform a suspicious Boyd that money for
the operation is coming from a shady Colombian "banker." Still, old-fashioned patriotism prevails and Boyd accepts the assignment, to swap Soviet mole Pyiotr Grushenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov) and a suitcase full of cash for an American held by the Russians. The plot backfires when Boyd recognizes
the American hostage as a phony. He breaks up the exchange and the chase is on, with Boyd and Grushenko running from both sides with the hot cash. The powers that be then force the issue by taking Grushenko's daughter Natasha (Geraldine Danon) hostage and setting up another exchange atop the
Eiffel Tower. The outcome is hardly in doubt, except for a confusing last-minute twist that makes Grushenko appear to be in cahoots with Colonel Grissom, leaving Boyd the odd man out (as actor Hackman has been in films ranging from THE CONVERSATION to NIGHT MOVES).
It's hard not to hope for the best walking into COMPANY BUSINESS. And, to a point, one gets the best. Hackman and Baryshnikov play easily together and director Nicholas Meyer's script provides them with characters that fit like a pair of old, comfortable gloves. Cinematographer Gerry Fisher also
makes good, atmospheric use of the film's main settings, Berlin (which actually looks mostly like a succession of soundstages) and Paris (which doesn't). But somehow, it's not quite enough. Meyer's plotting, while ingenious on a mechanical level (this is the man that wrote THE SEVEN PERCENT
SOLUTION and directed TIME AFTER TIME), is weak on a dramatic level. It's never quite credible that Hackman's bosses would draw in the collective muscle of the Agency, the KGB and Mikhail Baryshnikov for a scam that would net them a scant $2 million. Meyer can be commended for giving the usual
buddy cliches a new spin, but the mood mix doesn't quite work in a film that's too light in the beginning to be a gripping thriller and too somber and violent towards the end to be a frothy comedy. Still, there are plenty of incidental pleasures, from the performances of the principals (with Oleg
Rudnick's world-weary KGB lieutenant also worthy of note) to the well-staged Eiffel Tower climax. COMPANY BUSINESS may not be anyone's idea of classic cinema, but it's one of the more entertaining failures of the year. (Violence, profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment
