Mean Streak (1999)

Predictable but entertaining.

This movie combines cops, serial murder, and baseball. Scott Bakula plays Lou Mattoni, an cop in the Bronx who teams up with a black FBI agent (Leon) to solve a series of gruesome murders. Someone is cutting off the thumbs of young black men and sending them to a prominent black baseball player who is closing in on breaking Joe DiMaggio's home run record. This is eerily reminiscent of a case Mattoni worked on some 15 years before. It doesn't take too much imagination to conclude that a white supremicist is the culprit.

The plotlines are predictable and the characters of the black FBI agent and Mattoni's girlfriend are not as fully developed as they could be. The divorced Mattoni drinks too much, swears too much, takes care of his infirm, retired-cop father, and visits his Latina, tarot-card reading cutie for occasional sex (think Mel Gibson in "Lethal Weapon" without the wacked humor.) He must come to terms with his previous partner's death and his unrealized bigotry while solving the serial murders.

Bakula does a New York accent pretty well but deserves better writing than this ("He's got my girl," he exclaims when the murderer kidnaps the cutie and connects her to some rinky-dink explosives.) This of course causes him to, in the movie's last ten minutes, solve the murders, bond with the FBI agent, and emotionally legitimize the cutie. The one fairly interesting plotline, the conflicted relationship between Mattoni and his negative and bigoted dad, is not explored as it could have been to make this a better movie.

All in all, pretty entertaining, but a thin plot, trite writing, and gratuitous sexual situations reduce what could have been a more compelling thriller to a mediocre one. December 27, 2000

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