A thief, a car, and a very bad hiding place
Black Moon Rising, directed by Harley Cokeliss and released in 1986, is a sleek, entertaining action thriller built around a wonderfully absurd premise. Tommy Lee Jones plays Sam Quint, a professional thief hired to steal a computer disc containing incriminating evidence against a major corporation. The job goes wrong, and Quint, desperate to hide the disc, stashes it in a prototype supercar called the Black Moon, a futuristic vehicle that is about to be shipped to Los Angeles. The car is stolen by a gang of car thieves, led by Linda Hamilton’s Nina, and Quint must track it down, recover the disc, and stay alive long enough to get paid. It is a film that knows exactly what it is: a fast, stylish chase movie with a high concept and a low tolerance for boredom. Jones, as Quint, is the perfect anchor for it, because he plays the whole absurd situation with complete seriousness, and that seriousness makes it funny and thrilling at the same time.
The Black Moon itself, a wedge-shaped, black prototype car designed for the film, is one of the great movie vehicles of the 1980s, a cousin to the DeLorean and the Knight Rider Trans Am. It is fast, it is beautiful, and it is, in the film’s logic, almost indestructible. Jones’s Quint is not a car enthusiast. He is a working thief, a man who treats the Black Moon as a problem to be solved, not a toy to be admired. That practical attitude gives the film its grounding. While the plot twists and the car chases accelerate, Jones remains calm, methodical, and professional, and the audience trusts him to figure a way out, even when the situation seems impossible. It is the same quality he would later bring to Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive: the sense of a man who does his job, whatever it is, with total competence.
A professional in a fantastic world
What makes Sam Quint such an enjoyable Jones role is that he is a professional in a world that keeps becoming more fantastic. The film’s villains are corporate, the car is futuristic, and the Los Angeles locations are photographed with a glossy, neon sheen. Quint, by contrast, is old-fashioned: a man in a jacket, with a plan, a gun, and a code. Jones plays him with a dry wit that is never quite a joke. When Quint explains his situation, or negotiates with Nina, or outwits a corporate hitman, there is a twinkle in his eye, but it is the twinkle of a man who has seen this kind of trouble before and is not impressed by it. That understated humour would become a hallmark of his later blockbuster work, especially as Agent K in Men in Black, where deadpan delivery is the whole joke.
Linda Hamilton, fresh from The Terminator, is excellent as Nina, the car thief who becomes Quint’s reluctant ally and romantic interest. Their partnership works because Jones and Hamilton play it as a meeting of professionals, not as a conventional romance. They respect each other’s skills, they argue about tactics, and they gradually, believably, come to trust each other. Jones, who has always been generous with co-stars, gives Hamilton plenty of room, and the film is better for it. The action scenes, including a memorable chase through a parking garage and a climactic confrontation in the desert, are well staged by Cokeliss, but they work because we care about Quint and Nina, not just about the car.
The 1980s action film, done right
Black Moon Rising belongs to a particular moment in 1980s cinema, when action films were becoming more elaborate and more self-conscious, and it stands out because it never loses sight of its hero. Many films of the era were dominated by their stunts or their vehicles. This one is dominated by Jones’s face, by his watchfulness, by his ability to convey thought in a close-up. When Quint is trying to break into a building, or to talk his way past a guard, or to decide whether to trust Nina, Jones makes the thinking visible, and that thinking is more exciting than any explosion. It is a reminder that action films work best when the audience believes in the person at the centre, and Jones, even in a film as fanciful as this one, is completely believable.
The film’s script, by John Carpenter, Desmond Lowden, and others, has Carpenter’s trademark economy: no wasted scenes, no unnecessary speeches, just a clean, propulsive story. Jones fits that style perfectly. He does not waste a gesture, and he does not waste a line. Every scene with Quint moves the story forward, and every scene also tells us something about who Quint is: a man who values loyalty, who dislikes corporations, and who, for all his criminality, has a code. That code, that sense of a man who lives by rules even when he is breaking the law, is a recurring theme in Jones’s work, from Cliff in Rolling Thunder to Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men. Sam Quint is a lighter, more playful version of it, but it is the same theme, and Jones plays it with the same conviction.
Why Sam Quint endures
Sam Quint endures as a signature Jones role because he shows Jones having fun. Too often, Jones is remembered only for his granite seriousness, but Black Moon Rising shows him enjoying himself, playing a thief with a twinkle and a plan, in a film that is pure entertainment. It is also a useful reminder of his range in the 1980s. Within a few years, he had played a father seeking redemption, a country husband, a small-town drifter, and now a high-tech car thief. No other actor of his generation moved so easily between genres, and no other actor made it look so effortless.
Watch Black Moon Rising for Jones’s performance, for the Black Moon itself, and for the pleasure of a well-made 1980s thriller that knows its own absurdity and embraces it. Notice how Jones never winks at the audience, even when the plot is at its most outlandish. He plays it straight, and because he plays it straight, we believe it. That is the secret of Tommy Lee Jones, in every genre: he believes, so we believe, and a film about a stolen computer disc hidden in a prototype car becomes, in his hands, a story about a professional man doing his job, and doing it well.