Narrow Margins

Narrow Margins was a little different than I expected. For a movie about a mob boss having his thieving attorney killed, then needing a witness eliminated, said mob boss is largely absent. He appears in the opening scene, when the killing takes place, and again at the end, during his trial. For a movie about the mob boss having a mole in the district attorney's office, we see very little of that. We don't even see what happens to the mole once he's discovered, we just know Gene Hackman as Deputy D.A. Caulfield figured out who it was, and eventually called someone higher up.

Almost all of the movie takes place on a train heading to Vancouver, as Hackman attempts to keep the identity and location of the witness hidden from the professional killers on the train with them. He does a good enough job of it that most of the tension comes from Hackman trying to avoid being spotted by them, which leads to several instances of him ducking into someone else's cabin and trying to explain why he's there, and in one case, leaping into bed with a woman, which seems like pushing your luck a little. Very surprised she didn't burst out screaming the second he left.

The movie does cheat a little by ensuring that Hackman can't get ahold of a real gun long enough for it to do him any good. They fall off the train, or he has to leave it behind because he's under fire. Had to be a degree of difficulty, I suppose. This is marginally offset by the professional killers being fairly stupid, under the apparent '80s movie rule that all bad guys are morons (Except Alan Rickman). I mean, for guys who thin so highly of themselves, they don't do very well at all. Sure, they have no idea what Anne Archer's character looks like. But they do know what Gene Hackman looks like, and it takes them until the last third of the movie to pin him down, then they fail to stick to him until he leads them where they want to go. There's only so many other places on the train he could stay before he'd have to check back in with her. otherwise she might decide he's been killed and jump off the train. I give her better odds of surviving alone in the Canadian wilderness than Hackman or the two killers.