Unlawful Entry

Unlawful Entry is a heck of a nail-biting suspense piece, and a surprisingly intelligent movie about the paradox of police brutality. [26 June 1992]

Opening with superbly creepy, character-driven suspense filmmaking, Unlawful Entry closes with a succession of shock scenes that look like they were lifted from a slasher film. In between, however, there are enough hard-edged, efficiently mounted thrills and plot twists to keep thrill lovers engrossed. [22 June 1992]

There is a formulaic inevitability to the ferocious finale, but good writing and superb, intelligent acting keep the movie fresh and tense to the last moment. [27 June 1992, p.C08]

A wonderfully nasty turn from Liotta, along with a novel treatment of familiar plotlines, elevates Kaplan's effort into the 'must see' category. Read full review

Although it exists primarily to send an audience into a bloodthirsty frenzy and has major credibility problems in the bargain, "Unlawful Entry" is still a very effective victimization thriller. Strongly following the "Fatal Attraction" pattern--to the point of having a very similar climax--well-crafted concoction trades in the sorts of elemental concerns and fears that get people mightily worked up. This, combined with controversy pic may engender based on its prominent plot element of excessive police violence, gives it the potential to become a summer sleeper hit. Read full review

An efficient little thriller that imparts loads of queasiness and reasonable amounts of suspense while serving as an excellent corrective to the shameless celebrations of LA police power and brutality in Lethal Weapon 3. Read full review

The movie is a thriller, with all the usual trappings of a thriller, but the director, Jonathan Kaplan, is able to place the story in a plausible world. The performances go for unstrained realism, the settings are slice-of-life, and until the final scenes even the sicko cop seems somewhere within the realm of possibility. Read full review

The acting is consistently good, with Liotta, in particular, creating a masterful portrait of implacable, blue-eyed terror--a man equally at ease explaining his vocation to a class of schoolkids ("I'm here to be your friend") as staging a cold-blooded murder. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it. Read full review

What does cut it, for action fans, is Kaplan's direction. Kaplan can spook audiences with the best of them. His movie is like a giant capacitor, storing tension, then releasing it at prescribed junctures in massive jolts. [26 June 1992, p.5]

With a thriller like this, details almost don't matter. It's entertaining enough to watch it get to where it's got to go. Liotta is seedy and creepy as the obsessed cop, disintegrating before our eyes. ''The only problem I have is sleazy, low-life whores like you,'' he tells a woman he picks up. Officer Pete has some hostility issues he needs to work on. [26 June 1992, p.G1]

Solid performances lend weight to the flakier elements, with Liotta turning crazed excess into something wild. Read full review

"Entry" is acted more intelligently than is usual in this type of cookie-cutter shocker. Stowe is luminously lovely and vulnerable, making her an ideal psycho-magnet; likably low-key Russell is the very model of a modern strong-but-sensitive hubby; and Liotta outdoes even his own previous best efforts at the nice-guy nut case. Read full review

A cut above the average thriller. For one thing, it's put together with enough professionalism to make you almost (but not quite) forget the implausibilities that films like this are inevitably prone to. And for another, its concern with cops getting out of line seems hardly far-fetched after what the world saw happening to Rodney G. King. Read full review

An efficient, intense formula thriller. Read full review

Oddly enough, Unlawful Entry can keep you from sleeping but when you wake up the next moring, it's hard to remember much about the movie. Read full review

Is there an audience left that really wants to see these games played one more time? Kaplan doesn't have his heart in these scenes. They lack the playful ambiguity of the movie's early episodes, which indicate that Pete might have reasons for his defensive brutality, that the wife just might be encouraging Pete's infatuation, and that her husband might be less heroic than he pretends to be. [26 June 1992, p.20]

But despite such echoes of previous stalker films, Unlawful Entry has plenty of goosey suspense and flinch- inducing gimmicks. [26 June 1992, p.G5]

Unlawful Entry manages to be more gripping than it is convincing, thanks to the story's inevitable movement toward a violent showdown. Read full review

By the time the boundaries between innocence and injuriousness have been drawn, it is apparent that the film could greatly benefit from more doubt than certainty. Read full review

But after introducing these issues, director Jonathan Kaplan ("The Accused") takes the easy, unimaginative way out by turning Liotta's character into a complete lunatic in the manner of the psycho-husband who terrorized Julia Roberts in "Sleeping With the Enemy." How much more interesting "Unlawful Entry" might have been if his character had been played brighter and less easily dispatched than simply with a bullet. [26 June 1992, p.C]

The audience is asked to be appalled by the cop's brutal methods, and then cheer when the hero reverts to the same law-of-the-jungle tactics to save his marriage. Revenge, in these movies, must be sweet, and the rule of the box office says the bloodier the better. [6 July 1992, p.54]

Unlawful Entry would be an important film if it followed this scene with an intelligent look at the social, political, and institutional problems that lead to such incidents. Unfortunately, the movie isn't serious-minded enough to do this. What could have been an incisive examination of an urgently relevant subject turns into mere melodrama with the usual sex-and-violence twists. [14 July 1992, p.11]

But this hackneyed stalker-rama, which pretends to be a call for gun control, ultimately is little more than an excuse to turn the bad guy into a human colander. The better to strain the moral pasta. Read full review

The actors do their darndest but the script puts few psychological thrills in the thriller, leaving them to work in a vacuum. [27 June 1992]

But weird as that is - and as insensitive as the studio's decision about the film's release date may be - the big question for most people is whether Unlawful Entry is a good movie. I think it isn't - not because the film exploits the Rodney King incident specifically, but because it is so exploitative generally. [27 June 1992, p.E1]

The script is too eager to rush to the high-concept payoff without providing dramatic or characterizational underpinning. [26 June 1992, p.34]