Into the Night

A fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller. Read full review

A little bit of Into the Night is funny, a lot of it is grotesque and all of it has the insidey manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening rooms. Read full review

The plot is minimal, but the film scores partly because of a high sense of fun, and partly because of the way Landis uses his LA locations. Read full review

What chiefly keeps this film on target, though, is Goldblum's marvelously deadpan reaction to all the bloodshed around him. The tone, despite the frequent bloodletting, is light, and the film works better than the script would indicate. Read full review

The film itself tries sometimes too hard for laughs and at other times strains for shock. Goldblum is nonetheless enjoyable as he constantly tries to figure out just what he’s doing in all of this. Read full review

In the early scenes, Landis and Goldblum work hard to make the character's depression dramatically real, and this infusion of gravity in a generally weightless genre brings a new meaning to the standard action scenes. But the idea vanishes around the midway mark—at about the point when the sun comes up—and the balance of the film is thin and familiar. Read full review

Into the Night is billed as a comedy-thriller, but the thrills are nothing but a generalized nastiness, the comedy an uneven collection of gags. Few of the jokes have anything to do with the characters (nor, for that matter, do the characters have anything to do with the characters); and few of the thrills have anything to do with the gags. Read full review

The belief here is that Landis simply has overstuffed what might have been a somewhat tender action picture with all manner of movie trivia and action scenes. After a while, the principal characters in the chase begin to move so fast that they become a blur and ultimately disappear. Read full review

Don't go to "Into the Night." It will numb your mind. It will bore your soul. And it will cost you $5. [8 March 1985, p.25]

The peculiar thing about Into the Night is that while it fails to deliver the conventional goods, it succeeds as an unclassifiable mood piece, a quirky voyage into seedy all-night Los Angeles. There are nice cameos from Bruce McGill as Pfeiffer's surly brother, and from David Bowie as a deadly hit man. It's good to see Goldblum in a leading role, even though he is kept on a tight rein; Pfeiffer is alluring and touching, like a precious object made from base parts. For the first time in a Landis movie, real pain reaches the surface. Propelled by B. B. King's haunting blues, this oddball movie sneaks under the skin. [11 March 1985, p.70]

This movie runs in great, lazy circles, covering its implausibilities with gags, and finishes with the let's-get-it-over-with patness of a movie- of-the-week. Goldblum's performance is the key: We never do figure out who he is beyond the easy guess that his cuckoldry was well-deserved. Sometimes he's in charge, outfoxing the thugs, and sometimes he's helpless, and a lot of the time he's just along for the ride. [12 March 1985, p.B4]