The Package (1989)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Seargent Johnny Gallagher (Gene Hackman) is a gruff, no nonsense army veteran who doesn't follow the rule book and leads his troops in his own distinct style. But when a mission he headed goes disasterously wrong, he finds himself assigned to escort troublesome prisoner Thomas Boyette (Tommy Lee Jones) back from Germany. But when Boyette escapes after an airport altercation, it sets in motion a chain of events, where Gallagher finds himself implicated in a murder and Boyette's true identity and intentions become more terrifying.

I've always been an admirer of The Fugitive and, especially, Under Siege, so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered, for the first time, this prior Tommy Lee Jones/Andrew Davis collaboration that doesn't seem to have as much recognition. Although I was interested in seeing it, I didn't expect it to be quite up to the standards of what was to follow from the pair and while it far from falls short of even this expectation, The Package does still come off very much like a build up to something better than something on an equal footing.

It opens well, in typical Davis style, and generally carries it's plot in quite a slick and competent fashion, but after a while it really does develop quite a TV movie feel, with a less involving plot and less engaging characters than those other great two films I mentioned, a story that feels slightly too heavy and complicated, while Hackman just phones in another hard faced, craggy army captain role and Jones doesn't have the material to bring his character here to life in the same way he brought out Strannix and Gerard.

All that said, though, this is still quite a worthy and well made effort that is slick and polished and carries itself well enough and certainly set in stone what was to follow from Jones and Davis. **