A 1988 action thriller from Touchstone Pictures, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Sidney Poitier and Tom Berenger.
FBI Agent Warren Stantin (Poitier) is chasing a jewel thief/murderer from San Francisco to Vancouver, despite a) not knowing what he looks like; And b) being a city boy and the Big Bad having infiltrated a group of fishermen going through the woods in Washington. To help him catch up, Stantin enlists a local tracker named Jonathon Knox (Berenger). Knox has extra incentive to help the Fed when he realies that his girlfriend Sarah (Kirstie Alley) — the fishing trip's guide — is also in danger.
Tropes found in this work:
- Bad People Abuse Animals: After taking a jeweler's wife and maid hostage to make him rob his own store, the killer brutally kills the family dog to show that he means business.
- Bears Are Bad News: The fishermen briefly have a bear scare, but it's just Steve using the bathroom. Later, Stantin and Knox run into a real bear. They try to just casually walk away, but it chases them for a distance.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: When Steve's gun drops from his backpack while trying to help a fisherman who's slipped going up the mountain — Steve pushes all the members of the fishing party to their doom - except the guide, as he needs Sarah to get him to the US/Canada border. Even when he gets there, he still keeps her alive in case he needs a hostage.
- City Mouse:
- Stantin does not like the wilds.
- All of the fishermen besides Ben (who boasts of catching several fish when he made the trip before) are unaccustomed to the wild, particularly Norman. He says that the closest he's even been to the wilderness before is the botanical gardens at the Bronx Zoo. He's going through a bad divorce and wanted to go on a vacation where he has no chance of running into his wife. He does voice some feelings that The World Is Just Awesome as the trip progresses, though.
- Cold Sniper: In the opening hostage standoff, Stantin is accompanied by an FBI sniper who is very grim and focused on his job (although he never fires his gun due to concern for the hostage's life).
- Country Mouse: Knox and Sarah are both avid mountain guides, and Knox shows a sense of disdain for the idea of living in an urban area.
- Crowd Song: The fishermen all sing as they hike on two occasions. First, they sing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," and later, after a false bear sighting, they sing the Davy Crockett theme song while jokingly repeating the line "Killed him a bear, when he was only three." Unusually for a trope, several of them are consistently off-key or out of sync.
- Damsel in Distress: Sarah spends half of the movie as a hostage of the Big Bad, being forced to guide him to Canada as her boyfriend and Stantin try to rescue her. However, she has several Defiant Captive moments and fights back in an effort to escape on two occasions.
- Determinator:
- Stantin goes more than twelve straight hours without sleep tracking down leads on the Big Bad, insists on pursuing him through a wilderness (guided by a Mountain Man) despite being a City Mouse, and presses on despite being fatigued and half-frozen. When they reach a mountain, he follows Jonathan up despite not knowing how to climb and refuses to let Knox help him out of a deadly situation until Knox promises to use a climbing rope to hoist him up the mountain rather than lowering him back down. He's also willing to go to Cowboy Cop lengths by posing as a hitman to make the villains' accomplice talk.
- Knox is pretty relentless in chasing down a dangerous killer to rescue Sarah, and repeatedly tries to get Stantin to turn back so he won't be slowed down.
- Disney Villain Death: The Big Bad throws all four of the other fishermen off a cliff to their deaths after his cover as an imposter is jeopardized.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: The innocent fishermen get several scenes as Red Herring suspects with some interesting City Mouse moments, then all four of them die within the space of a minute or so once Norman sees Steve's gun halfway through the movie.
- Establishing Character Moment: When the killer finds out that the police have surrounded him, he tells them over the phone that he's releasing one of his hostages to deliver a message. He shoots the woman as soon as she's out the door and sardonically asks if Agent Stantin got his message. He then proceeds to escape while foreseeing all of their likely moves. The scene effectively establishes both his cruelty and his cleverness.
- Fakeout Escape: At the end of the opening sequence, the mysterious killer escapes the police with his stolen diamonds in a boat waiting at a pier. However, when the police chase it down with their own boat, they find the steering controls have been tied off with ropes, and the killer has swum back to shore in the meantime.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Stantin has to threaten to arrest Knox to make the guide let him accompany Knox through the mountains to rescue Sarah. Stantin and Knox mock each other's lifestyle choices and have several fights about how Knox feels Stantin's actions are endangering Sarah. Ultimately though, the two develop a sense of respect for each other, and Stantin lets Knox accompany him after as he goes after Sarah and her captor even after all of them have left the mountains and he doesn't need Knox anymore.
- Foreshadowing: Steve complains about his hiking boots not fitting properly, which is hardly surprising as they belong to the man he killed.
- Genre Shift: The movie starts as an ordinary police procedural story in the city, then goes into the wilderness for a manhunt with New Old West and mystery vibes, before the last act returns to being an urban-based crime thriller (with a Car Chase and a shootout on a ferry) once the characters make it out of the wilderness.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Used for trolling by both Knox and Susan.
- Stantin isn't happy when told that he's eating a marmot that Knox caught.Stantin: A rodent... you mean a rat?Knox: Yeah... it is a kind of giant rat, I guess.
- Susan tries to cook up some fish, but the killer puts out the fire as the smoke will give away their position. Susan calmly replies that they'll have sushi instead and eats her fish raw, to his disgust.
- Stantin isn't happy when told that he's eating a marmot that Knox caught.
- Implausible Deniability: A diamond fence claims a call the villain made to him was a wrong number even though the call lasted nineteen minutes.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: The killer has one moment of near-decency, which quickly turns into a major Kick the Dog moment. When Norman nearly falls off a cliff, the killer scrambles to save his life despite having nothing to gain from this (other than possibly maintaining his "cover" as a regular guy on the trip). Then the killer murders him after dropping the gun he's been hiding in front of Norman. Seconds later, he kills the other three fishermen even though they bought his story about Norman's death being an accident. He has an opportunity to kill them (relatively) quickly and painlessly with his gun but instead sadistically throws them over the cliff one by one to save bullets.
- Karma Houdini: A mugger at the drop site the police are surveilling in the climax steals a woman's purse and then escapes because the cops can't risk blowing their cover.
- Karmic Death: Steve tries to shoot Stantin in the eye during their underwater fight in the climax. Stantin shoots him in the eye instead.
- Love at First Sight: Sheriff Arnett claims that Knox and Sarah fell in love within seconds of meeting each other.
- Market-Based Title: Released as Deadly Pursuit outside of North America.
- Mountain Man: Jonathan Knox is a grizzled, surly mountain guide who lived alone in the woods until he met Sarah, and is the perfect man to help Stantin pursue a fugitive who's decided to Run for the Border.
- New Old West: The second and third quarters of the movie follow an FBI agent and his Mountain Man guide chasing a killer through the mountains of Washington state, braving blizzards and treacherous cliffs with barely any technology in sight.
- The Quiet One: Steve has the least dialogue out of the five fishermen by far. Once he's revealed as the Big Bad and doesn't have to worry about being caught in lies anymore, he gets more talkative.
- Reasonable Authority Figure:
- Stantin's boss at the FBI doesn't criticize him over the failed hostage negotiations at the beginning and tells him to get some rest so he can be at his best when he resumes work.
- Sheriff Arnett in Washington and Superintendent Hsu in Vancouver are both meticulous law enforcement professionals who are unfailingly accommodating to the heroes. Hsu even aids in Stantin and Knox's Cowboy Cop antics.
- Reduced to Ratburgers: Knox happily Trolls the City Mouse Agent Stantin about how the marmot he killed for their dinner is essentially a giant rat.
- Run for the Border: The film follows a murderous diamond thief infiltrating a fishing party that will take him toward the Canadian border as an FBI agent and the boyfriend of the fishing guide pursue them. Unusually for the trope, all of them cross the border well before the climax, and the cops on the other side of the border help the protagonists continue their pursuit.
- Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: When the killer offers his captive, Sarah, one of the stolen diamonds if she'll willingly guide him to the border, she throws it back in his face.
- Sherlock Scan: Agent Stantin quickly determines that the Big Bad and his captive Sarah stopped at a house based on the evidence left behind.Stantin: I don't think [the intruders] were teenagers. What teenagers are going to drink just milk and cokes when when there's also beer in the refrigerator? On that side, the table and the utensils have been wiped clean. Over here, prints everywhere. Why? The suspect brought Sarah here. Rope fibers. He tied her to the leg of this table, sat over there where you are, and ate.
- Signature Move: The killer likes to execute his victims by shooting them in one of their eyes. This gives him away when he disposes of a member of Susan's group this way, bringing Stantin up to the border to hunt for him.
- Spanner in the Works: The killer would have got away clean, but he sees a police roadblock and thinks it's a dragnet out for him, when it's actually just a traffic accident. This causes him to Kill and Replace a member of the group Susan is guiding.
