Richard Malone (Burt Reynolds) is a killer for the CIA who finally gest sick of it and quits. He drives across the country, getting lost, ending up somewhere in Oregon where he takes his busted Ford Mustang to the garage of Paul Barlow (Scott Wilson) and his daughter Jo (Cynthia Gibb). Marlow tells him that he should go to a bigger town because getting the parts is going to take some time. Malone has nowhere to go, so he stays in Barlow’s spare room and the two bond over being Vietnam veterans.

The town is being taken over by Charles Delaney (Cliff Robertson) who ends up being more than just an evil rich person and is also a white nationalist — funny how that keeps working out — and eventually his henchman start making life tough for Malone. The ex-assassin puts Dan Bollard (Dennis Burkley) in the hospital and kills that man’s brother Calvin (I really need to make a Tracy Walter appearance Letterboxd) when he tries to get back at him.

Sheriff Hawkins (Kenneth McMillan) may be someone Malone can trust but there are so many bought police officers and killers in town now that Delaney puts a hit on him. His handler, Jamie (Lauren Hutton) arrives to kill him, but come on, he’s Burt Reynolds and they’re soon making sweet love and because she’s a woman in an 80s action movie, she needs to die to give our hero emotion and reason to come back from his depression.

Based on Shotgun by William Wingate, Reynolds was, as always, honest about the movie: “I was attracted to Malone because I thought there was a chance the movie might be more than a guy running away from his past. Let’s be honest. The film is Shane. I am an ex-CIA man whose car breaks down in a small town who then gets close to a family and attempts to battle a Lyndon LaRouche character played by Cliff. I’m not doing Clint in Pale Rider. There’s a little bit of Stallone from First Blood in this, but I’m not playing the damaged-goods-guy Sly became in Rambo. Just to show you how movies change, Gérard Depardieu and Christopher Lambert at one point were going to play Malone. I wonder how this guy got rewritten into me.”

Reynolds was paid $3 million for this movie but this was a tough time in his career. He was dealing with so much. He knocked out Dick Richards on the set of Heat — Richards later tried to sue Reynolds for $25 million for the assault and Reynolds said, “I spent $500,000 for that punch. If I hit a guy, it’s certain that he will run a studio or become a huge director.” — had been in a series of flops like Stick, The Man Who Loved Women and Stroker Ace. He was also fighting rumors that he had AIDS. He was injured on the set of City Heat when he was hit in the jaw with a real chair instead of a breakaway prop. The jaw pain and TMJ kept him from eating solid food which is why he lost thirty pounds. He also became addicted to painkillers.

The Kino Lorber blu ray of this movie has commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson and a trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.