Author Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled crime novels might have seriously benefited from the new permissiveness of '70s and '80s Hollywood...but it turns out the filmmakers here weren't interested in doing anything creative with all the old clichés, and so we have Spillane's detective Mike Hammer making love to a sex therapist with saxophones blaring in the background. Hammer, whose New York office is across the street from the Pussycat Theatre (!), assigns himself to the murder case of his one-armed war buddy, with a dirty police chief, the C.I.A., and a sex clinic at the heart of the mystery. As Hammer, American-born Armand Assante is completely miscast. With his slurry, Euro-trash accent and indifferent expression, Assante saunters through like a male gigolo; rumpled panache doesn't come easily to him--and neither does leering. Assante isn't the mischievous or lascivious sort, and so when naked sex clinic bunnies pounce on him, his shooing them away seems more awkward and unrealistic than how the old-school private eyes used to handle the broads (either by getting rough or by taking care of their business off-screen). Director Richard T. Heffron does paltry work; he can't even stack the deck against Hammer convincingly, turning an interrogation/torture sequence into an episode out of "The Perils of Pauline". Barbara Carrera (as the operator of the sex clinic) is used only for her slim, exotic body and, though she's a stunning nude, it's an insult to any professional actor to be cast on the merits of their genitalia. Assante wouldn't know--he takes off his shirt but nothing more. * from ****
Review of I, the Jury
