Director: Richard Tuggle
Cast: Anthony Michael Hall, Jenny Wright, Jeff Kober, Glynn Turman

Some time ago, I was on a popular Internet forum, and I saw a question one of the other members of the forum had posted. The question was, "Why hasn't Jason Statham been cast as James Bond?" It didn't take long for some other member of the forum to post an answer, listing the fact that Statham was now too old for the role, that he has a Cockney accent that isn't traditional for actors playing James Bond, and that he is missing the suave and romantic side past James Bond actors have had. I'd add that Statham also has less hair than Sean Connery, and while I have enjoyed the movies of his that I have watched, I see that Statham basically plays the same character in every movie; he lacks range. Obviously, Statham is not going to go a different direction in his career, which is fine in his case - he keeps getting work year after year. But for other actors, getting typecast in the same kind of role can not only be career stifling, it can also be wearying for the mind of the actor. There have been countless actors who have been stuck playing the same kind of role over and over, but have been unable to break free due to the narrow-mindedness of studio executives. To be fair to those studio executives, the public can be fickle and just want that actor to play the same kind of character over and over, and on those occasions when a typecast actor gets put into a new role, the consequences can be harsh for the actor. Take the case of John Belushi, for example. Years ago I reviewed an obscure movie that he starred in, Old Boyfriends. Up to that point in his career, Belushi was known for playing outrageous and broad comic characters in comedies, which had found great favor with audiences around the world. But for a change of pace, he decided to do Old Boyfriends to try his hand at playing a more serious character in a straight drama. However, when the movie was released to theaters, Belushi was immediately hit with a big backlash from his fans. They had gone to see "a John Belushi" movie, but they didn't like his dabbling in straight drama, and the movie ended up being a box office bomb.

There is the case of actor Anthony Michael Hall. If you are a Gen-Xer like I am, no doubt you remember that in the first part of the 1980s, he achieved a lot of fame from appearing in John Hughes movies such as National Lampoon's Vacation, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club. Despite his rising star status, Hall was unsatisfied; all of these movies were portraying him as a kind of wimpish geek, and he wanted to change how the public perceived him. So when the movie project Out Of Bounds came his way, he jumped for it. It wasn't a comedy like his other movies, but instead a hard-hitting vehicle full of action that made him feel could change how the public would perceive him, and subsequently lead him to more "adult" movies. Unfortunately, the movie didn't work out for him for several reasons. It was made by Columbia Pictures, which in the 1980s was a studio suffering from severe internal management problems, which in part resulted in many movies coming out being given theatrical releases that were small and/or underpublicized. While Out Of Bounds did manage to get a full theatrical release, it wasn't given a strong marketing campaign. I remember already being a big movie buff as a teen in the 1980s, and not once did I ever come across any marketing material for it; I only learned about the movie for the first time when I was surprised by suddenly seeing a video box for it at a local video rental store. I subsequently learned that when the movie was released to theaters, it got negative reviews from critics, which certainly didn't help its prospects. Indeed, the movie flopped at the box office, and Hall's theatrical career never really recovered from this flop. The negative air surrounding the movie turned me off from watching it at the time and right up to recently, when I thought it might be an interesting movie to review despite its smell of doom.

In Out Of Bounds, Hall plays a teenage wimp named Daryl, who lives on a farm with his parents in Iowa. The parents of the wimpish Daryl are divorcing, and apparently neither his father or mother wants him, because not long after the movie starts, the wimp is put on an airplane to fly to Los Angeles to live with his grown-up brother Tommy (Kevin McCorkle, The Amazing Spider-Man) and his wife Chris (Linda Shayne, The Lost Empire). On the flight, the wimpish Daryl somehow manages to strike up a good rapport with a young woman nicknamed "Dizz" (Jenny Wright, I, Madman), though the two go their own ways once the airplane lands in L.A. The wimpish Daryl meets Tommy and Chris, Tommy grabs his bag at the airport luggage carousel, and the three head to Tommy's house. What the wimpish Daryl doesn't know is that his brother grabbed the wrong bag at the carousel - a bag that contains a huge amount of heroin belonging to a drug dealer named Roy (Jeff Kober, Lucky Stiff). Naturally, Roy is pretty peeved when he finds his drugs have been taken, and he gets to work tracing where the wimpish Daryl has gone. At Tommy's house, the wimpish Daryl retires for the night, and in the morning - where it's shown he slept in his clothes and shoes, apparently not needing anything like sleepwear or toiletries the night before - he opens "his" bag and finds the heroin. He immediately rushes to his brother and sister-in-law to report this, but finds that they have been murdered. The reason why the wimpish Daryl wasn't also murdered earlier (by guess who) is too dumb and contrived to report here, but what's even dumber is that when his brother's neighbor walks in the house (without first knocking or asking if he can come in), the wimpish Daryl unbelievably screws up so badly that in quick notice he's on the run from both the police - led by one Lieutenant Delgado (Glynn Turman, Five On The Black Hand Side) - and Roy. While on the run, the wimpish Daryl decides that only Dizz can help him out of this mess... because he's a stupid wimp.

In case you are wondering why the stupid wimp doesn't call his parents for help while he's on the run, it's because his father has gone on a camping trip, his mother went out of state to visit friends, and the stupid wimp earlier somehow incorrectly wrote down the wrong contact phone number for his mother. Are you getting an idea about how stupid and contrived Out Of Bounds is? If not, let me report that when the stupidly wimpish Daryl eventually tracks down Dizz at the restaurant where she works and, in a panic, tells her the crappy situation he's currently in, she almost immediately quits her job in the middle of her shift to set out to help this sniveling stupid wimp, no questions asked. And trust me, the stupidity in this movie doesn't end at this point. We are to believe that once the stupid and wimpish Daryl goes on the run, a motorcyclist the stupid and wimpish Daryl holds a gun to his head and forces him to race away from the cops isn't subsequently peeved once the cops are lost after the risky getaway... that later, when Roy spots Dizz and the stupid wimp Daryl at a crowded nightclub, he makes a big show to pull out a gun and chase the two in front of dozens of witnesses... that later, the stupid wimp Daryl finds the keys to a city bus in a transit parking lot and is able to drive it... that later, the stupid wimp Daryl is able to easily wrestle around with Roy on a speeding Mack truck... and at the end of the movie, right after the mano a mano final confrontation with Roy, the stupid wimp Daryl is able to walk away arm to arm with Dizz from the just-arrived police, who apparently don't need to have a long talk with both of them to clear up any still-murky details.

Oh, and that aforementioned final confrontation? There's no surprise as to what the stupid wimp Daryl does during it, because the movie gives us an unbelievably blatant clue to what will happen during the confrontation in the first five minutes of Out Of Bounds. What makes it even worse is you can't believe that the stupid wimp would be able to pull it off once the chips are down. Thanks to actor Anthony Michael Hall, the stupid wimp character of Daryl comes across almost like a befuddled zombie in the first stretch of the movie. Then about a third of the movie, the stupid wimp has a disguise put on him that's supposed to make him suddenly look cool and with street smarts, but does it work? Uh-uh. Well, to a degree, I can't really blame Hall for not being able to give a more believable performance. Aside from establishing Daryl as a stupid wimp, we learn almost nothing about this character, which would result in any actor in the role having difficulty acting in a believable manner. For that matter, the other lead actors have a difficult time making any headway as well in their roles. Jenny Wright just seems to be going through the motions playing a punkish-like young woman, and she manages to generate not the least bit of chemistry with the character of the stupid wimp Daryl. (If you, by the way, guessed that her character at one point is held hostage by Roy, give yourself some bonus points.) Likewise, Glynn Turman as the authority figure is just made to go through the standard and familiar sternness and demanding you've seen in countless other action movies and television shows. As for Jeff Kober as the lead bad guy, I will admit that he does bring to his role somewhat of an effective oily sadistic charisma akin to some other villainous actors of the same '80s period, such as Richard Lynch and Billy Drago. However, this potent charisma is about all that Kober can do for the role. The character of Roy doesn't have much dialogue, and he doesn't commit all that many acts that would be sadistic and memorable in nature. In the end, Roy isn't that much more memorable than your typical drug dealing movie villain.

In fact, much of the rest of Out Of Bounds just seems to be going through the motions as well. Before getting into that, I'll briefly mention the few elements in the movie that are worthy of merit. The music that runs throughout is decent, containing songs from '80s bands (The Smiths, Night Ranger, and The Cult, among others), plus a music score by Stewart Copeland from the band The Police. The night photography by Bruce Surtees (Movie Movie) is a definite eye-catcher (though the daytime sequences look surprisingly flat.) And here and there, director Richard Tuggle (Tightrope) does manage to generate some atmosphere when showing the nighttime seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. But overall, viewers probably won't be surprised to learn that Tuggle only directed two movies in his entire career. Besides not apparently being able to patch up the aforementioned shortcomings of the movie, some parts of the movie kind of look cheap for a major Hollywood studio movie. Plus, the moments of action, apart from one kind cool moment involving an Uzi, are entirely flat and routine, with both a lack of intensity as well as frequently being edited in a manner that often makes it hard to know who is who and what exactly is going on. Tuggle doesn't seem to have any creativity with action, including staging the action climax in - yes, you guessed it - a deserted machine shop, which isn't any better than the fraternal twin setting of a deserted warehouse. While watching Out Of Bounds, I kept thinking how much better the movie would probably have been if Tuggle had put more enthusiasm into the movie. Had the movie been more energetic, and more exploited the sleazy elements of the Los Angeles setting, the movie might have ended up being a dumb but guilty pleasure despite all the flaws I listed earlier. But when it came to this, Tuggle seemed to have been out of ideas.

(Posted August 20, 2026)