Cop Target (1990) User Reviews

I want an automatic cat-feeding machine!

[Coventry · 5/10 · 15 August 2020]

Umberto Lenzi was perhaps the busiest Italian director of his generation. With more than 65 films on his repertoire, he was a pioneer, trendsetter, master-imitator and overall great entertainer! Just think of all the brilliant Poliziotesschi, Gialli and cannibal exploitation movies he made. By the time of the late 80s/early 90s, however, it looked as if Lenzi's batteries were running low. He was still making lots of movies, but they weren't so virulent, explosive and insane anymore. "Cop Target" is representative of the final Lenzi movies. True fans of his work will still enjoy it, but the vast majority of neutral viewers is likely to label it as dull, uninspired and redundant. Not me, though! It's a fun, albeit insignificant, actioner/thriller starring the great (late) Robert Ginty and Charles Napier in a sleazy supportive role. Plus, the story takes place in the Dominican Republic, in the sunny area of San Cristóbal, so Lenzi and his crew got at least a good vacation out of it!

Farley Wood is a loner Miami cop, assigned to escort a diplomate's widow and her daughter to a ceremony to honor her husband who supposedly got murdered whilst cleansing out the drug cartels of San Cristóbal. Wood and the widow, Deborah Kent, don't get along very well, so he remains in the background. Barely arrived at the island, the 8-year-old daughter is brutally kidnapped by drug lords. Wood quickly discovers that the dead diplomate wasn't the hero everybody claims he was, and that all authority figures on the island are utterly corrupted. There are a handful of great action sequences, like the beach kidnapping and the shootout at the abandoned factory, but admittedly there are slightly too many sequences with Ginty just sitting at a bar drinking Coca-Cola's and bickering with the widow. The most remarkable scene, in fact, is still at the beginning, when Farley prepares for his couple of days of leave and activates his "automatic cat-feeding machine" for his pet Arthur. I surely need to get one of those!

So....what's the point?

[d_m_maier · 3/10 · 18 September 2001]

I watched this, and I couldn't escape the bad bad ff key sometimes. Slow introduction, bad motivation, characters changing without any explanation, Ginty looking suspicious, a cat-feeding machine is featured, Napier is wasted, Franco Fantasia - good to see he's well and alive saves a point - what is this about? An action film without action, a suspense movie without a clue. A mess.

"The condor is landing"

[hwg1957-102-265704 · 5/10 · 11 May 2021]

A Miami cop, Farley Wood, is tasked with escorting a DEA agent's widow to an award ceremony to honour the dead husband, in San Cristobel. This is a very routine film with no surprises that only comes to life with the beach abduction scene. Otherwise it is very predictable. The main lead Robert Ginty is wooden as Wood and even Charles Napier can't make much of his underwritten role. The best element is the interesting music score by Lanfranco Perini. And the best actor is of course Arthur the cat.

Umberto Lenzi directs this boring action film

[Serpent-5 · 7 December 2000]

Robert "The Exterminator" Ginty! Directed by Umberto Lenzi! This can't go wrong! It was booooring! Slow, poorly paced action film has Ginty as a tough cop escorting a widow of a DEA agent who goes to a small country to see her dead husband who was killed in the line of duty. Ginty, who's films I always liked, is trying to work on very badly written script. Charles Napier is also wasted. Good location, but bad sound doesn't help. Hardly any violence coming from Lenzi who usually make gory films. Not recommended.

Target Missed

[morrison-dylan-fan · 4/10 · 14 September 2012]

After having felt a bit ill for the last couple of days,I decided to re- start my movie viewing with a bang!,by watching Umberto Lenzi's last ever Italian Crime film.

The plot:

Spotting a mugger attempting to steal a woman's handbag,undercover cop Farley Wood decides to go and save the woman.Trying his best to help,the mugger ends up getting away,when the woman (who is really a transvestite) starts to hit Farley.Originally planning to take the transvestite back to the station to be charged,Wood eventually decides to give a "second chance" and frees the transvestite.Reaching the police station,Farley is quickly given orders by the police captain that he is being sent on a secret mission to San Cristobal as a hired body guard for the widow and child of a deceased US delegate who is being honoured for everything he did in helping the country's war on drugs,which ended up costing him his life.

Arriving in San Cristolbal,Farley quickly discovers that the country's gangsters are determined to make the late delegate's family pay,for everything that their late husband/father caused them to lose.

View on the film:

For the screenplay of the film,writer Ralmondo Del Balzo scatter's a number of terrific quirky moments, (such as Wood fighting with a transvestite,to de-bugging phones) which help to give the film a nice pleasant feel,which is able to make up for a number of flaws in the directing that sadly ruin the movie.

Having become a big fan of Lenzi's energetic,scatter-shot directing style,I was sad to see,that for his final Italian Crime film,all of the energy which Lenzi used to display,appear to have completely burnt out. Despite Balzo's screenplay offering some wild quirky moments,Lenzi disappointingly shoots all of the film in a very plodding,stuck in cement style,which causes the movie to go out on a dying whimper,instead of the explosive bang that it so deserved.

One for die hard fans only...

[Leofwine_draca · 4/10 · 14 May 2016]

There's a general rule of thumb that says the newer the Umberto Lenzi film, the worse it will be. Well, that holds true with COP TARGET, Lenzi's 1990 crime thriller that lacks the panache and style of his gritty, on-the-street '70s polizia flicks. COP TARGET is a tired detective outing that copies a million American flicks without ever providing any originality or verve of its own. Robert Ginty, once a minor star in THE EXTERMINATOR, now looks old, tired and pudgy, and the attempts at humour that Lenzi repeatedly tries with his world-weary detective character fall flat every time. It doesn't help that Ginty's co-star is equally aged and unattractive; Barbara Bingham is ten years too old for the part and her abrasive heroine quickly gets on the nerves.

Not that the film is particularly poorly made; indeed, the direction is often adequate and Lenzi shoots some nice locations. Ginty isn't exactly a bad leading actor, just a little dull in places, although he knows how to hold his pistol in the action sequences. Speaking of pistols, you've gotta love the sequence where Ginty takes a gun carefully to pieces and cleans it with salad dressing (!); this whole thing has been copied from THE EXTERMINATOR, and you get the impression that Lenzi was desperate for viewers to recall that superior exploitation movie.

This movie, meanwhile, is almost plot less, and totally devoid of suspense. Although there are some car chases and exploding vehicles, it never gets the pulse beating. There are one or two cheesy action sequences to be enjoyed, for sure, the best of which is the bit where a drug gang storms a pleasure beach, attacking lifeguards with machine guns and engaging in gun battles and fist fights with our ageing action hero. The only other name in the cast is exploitation stalwart Charles Napier, playing a corrupt American official who gets his just desserts come the movie's laboured climax. COP TARGET is a pretty boring movie with only a few elements of interest for the die-hard genre fan. But I doubt anyone will bother watching this – especially when there are so many better films out there.

Cop Target should get its long-overdue home video release, hopefully from Severin. Here's a box cover quote for them: It's Ginty! It's Napier! It's Lenzi! It's EXCITEMENT!"

[tarbosh22000 · 7/10 · 25 April 2024]

Farley Wood (Ginty) is a Miami cop who may be getting close to the edge. His only friend is his cat, Arthur. Wood has a gigantic contraption in his apartment that can automatically provide Arthur with food, water, and, presumably, cat litter. This device is going to come in handy, because Wood is assigned to go to the tropical island of San Cristobal and he can't always be home to tend to Arthur personally. His assignment is to act as bodyguard and escort to Deborah Kent (Bingham), and her young daughter Priscilla (Borrel). They're scheduled to attend some fancy function, and there is a possible terrorist threat against them.

Things take a turn for the worst when Priscilla is kidnapped by the evil baddies in question. Even though his superiors tell him to leave the case to the proper authorities, Wood goes rogue in his attempt to get Priscilla back. An American embassy official named John Granger (Napes) is also involved. As Wood peels back the onion of this case, he slowly discovers dirty dealings, corrupt dealings, and political dealings, which are all pretty much the same thing. With all the terrorist guns trained against him, will Farley Wood manage to prevent becoming a COP TARGET?

With Cop Target, we have three of our favorite people together: Umberto Lenzi, Robert Ginty, and Charles Napier. We should also mention Jeff Moldovan, who we haven't seen around these parts in a while. God bless Umberto Lenzi. Even in the latter phases of his career, he still managed, seemingly effortlessly, to put together an entertaining romp that's easy to enjoy. While the film slows a bit in the middle (a very common occurrence, especially for this era of the genre), it rallies at the end and has a lot going for it overall.

The Ginty that's here is the Ginty ya want. In an era when Miami cops were all the rage, even his car has unique character. Sonny Crockett drove a black Ferrari Daytona Spyder. Farley Wood drives a beaten-up jalopy that looks to be about thirty seconds away from the car-crusher. However, beneath his gruff exterior, he's a cop with a heart. This is best expressed in his brief scenes with the young girl, Priscilla. It's clear she begins to see him as the father figure she's been missing, and perhaps she is what he is lacking in his own life as well. After all, a robotic cat litter machine can only take you so far. (But what a ride while it lasts). This motivates his drive to, against all odds, retrieve Priscilla from the clutches of the baddies. Also, when we first see her, she's dressed exactly like Madeline, who must have been quite the fashion icon for little girls at that time.

You don't get a ton of Napes, but what you do get is good, and they clearly used his real voice. It would have been a stupid move if they didn't. While his presence doesn't dominate the film, he does get to play an important ace when he ends up being the man behind the exploding helicopter. According to Imdb, the ex-heli is taken from Cobra Mission 2 (1988), and other parts of a car chase were taken from Final Score (1986). This may or may not include the fruit cart. It's tough to tell when cars are running over fruit. Lenzi should be noted for his economy in that sense. Hey, if you're gonna recycle footage, recycle from the best.

Ginty's name in here is Farley, and Napier's is Granger. Could this be a reference to the great actor Farley Granger, who was no stranger to Italian exploitation films - exemplified by Amuck, So Sweet So Dead (both 1972), What Have They Done To Your Daughters? (1974), among others? Or are those names just what Italians think all Americans are called, and those are just typical, common examples? In any case, the film should also get credit for predating American Assassin (2017) by many years, as the beach assault scene in that film seems modeled after the one in Cop Target.

We would say that was a definite, but Cop Target never got a U. S. VHS or DVD release. Sadly, a lot of Italo-Action films at this time suffered a similar fate. Cop Target would have been a perfect release for Lightning Video, or perhaps it should have gotten a clamshell box release on Imperial like Operation Nam (1986). Operation Nam is the U. S. title for Cobra Mission, and Jeff Moldovan also appeared in Cobra Mission 2, from which the exploding helicopter was sourced. See, it all comes back around.

We really believe that fans will rejoice should Cop Target get its long-overdue home video release, hopefully from Severin. Here's a box cover quote for them: It's Ginty! It's Napier! It's Lenzi! It's EXCITEMENT!" Hopefully they use that. If they don't like it, I can come up with others.

Ginty's finest film since "The Exterminator"

[jasempre-1 · 10/10 · 12 December 2010]

In the IMDb reviews for the film, "Cop Target" has been described as a 'slow, boring, poorly paced action film with no action.' I'm pretty sure the reviewers did not watch the film.

From start to finish, "Cop Target" was a fun fast-paced action film directed by Umberto Lenzi and starring Robert Ginty and Charles Napier.

Like all low-budget films (especially Italian ones) there is some cheesy dialogue and over-the-top acting. But "Cop Target" was not riddled with it (though, we could have done without the "automatic cat feeding machine" segment). Majority of the film has great (evenly spaced) action, decent dialogue and acting. Ginty really acts his heart out and does a great job. Next to "The Exterminator", Ginty gives one of his best performances in an action film. He plays a tough cop with humor and heart very well. However, Charles Napier (who is very much welcome in the film) could have had a better role (but, he wasn't TOO wasted). It was great to see him star with Ginty in a film.

If your a fan of low-budget action, Italian crime, and Robert Ginty...don't miss this one! I own a lot of Ginty's films and "Cop Target" is definitely one of his best and is one of my favorite Ginty films. Revok.com has DVD copies in widescreen but contains small Japanese subs (they are easy to ignore). 7/10

Action-packed cop thriller by Umberto Lenzi!

[B. Simmons · 14 January 2001]

This film is actually quite good. Robert Ginty stars as a cop who is hired to escort a rich woman and her kid to an awards ceremony on the tropical island of San Cristobal (this film was actually shot in Miami and Santo Domingo). While there, her daughter is kidnapped by a group of seedy South American thugs, and is held for ransom. Ginty begins to get official "orders" to leave the case to the FBI, but he decides to do his own investigating. He finds that the crime may have had political motivations. This film reminds me of something you'd see on late-night TV. Although it in no way compares to Lenzi's earlier works, it stands up well, and is quite enjoyable to watch.