Is Shakedown (1988) the Craziest Buddy Cop Movie of the 80s?

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Richie, I love you, pal.

[00:00:03]You are definitely new to the planet.

[00:00:06]>> [music] >> Okay, picture this. It's 1988. You walk into a movie theater with your popcorn in hand and ready for a decent Friday night. The lights are going down and what you get is a courtroom drama. Okay, fine. You can work with that. Peter Weller, fresh off of playing a literal cyborg in RoboCop, is doing his best earnest lawyer thing and it's actually pretty good. There's real tension and corruption and legal strategy. You're not alone thinking this is going to be one of those gritty serious New York crime pictures. And then Sam Elliott straps himself to the landing gear of a Learjet, shoots out an engine, lobs a grenade into the wheel well, and plunges into the East River as the plane explodes over Manhattan in what is, let's be honest, some of the most cheerfully unconvincing green screen footage ever committed to film. The man is dangling off a dang jet, people, and you're here absolutely losing your mind in the best way possible. That right there is Shakedown in a nutshell. It has no business being this fun and yet here [music] we are, nearly four decades later still talking about it. So, let's dive in.

[00:01:08]Come on, let's get some chow. My treat.

[00:01:10]That's where the shakedown.

[00:01:12]That's where that didn't go.

[00:01:14]Shakedown was written and directed by James Glickenhaus, a New York City filmmaker who had already built a cult following with gritty urban actioners like The Exterminator and The Soldier.

[00:01:23]By the mid-80s, Glickenhaus was running Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, a production outfit that cranked out the kind of hard edge, no frills action that major studios were starting to smooth out and sanitize. He was exactly the right guy to make this movie. The genesis of Shakedown came from a newspaper article Glickenhaus read about a drug dealer who shot a cop and claimed self-defense, arguing the officer was actually trying to rob him. That morally murky little story became the spine of the film. The working title was Blue Jean Cop, a term which is used in the movie to describe dirty cops who can afford designer denim because they're on the take. It's a great title, honestly, but Universal Pictures, which picked up distribution, insisted on changing it to Shakedown for the North American market.

[00:02:04]Glickenhaus reportedly wasn't thrilled about that, but it wasn't a fight he was going to win. The film was released internationally under the Blue Jean Cop title in the UK, Australia, and Germany, which is why you might find that version floating around in some corner of the internet. There's also a fun bit of trivia involving Warner Brothers, who originally made a play to distribute the film until they got cold feet. Why?

[00:02:23]Well, because a character in the movie uses Clint Eastwood's iconic >> Make my day. And Warner was worried it might tick the legend off. They don't want to get the old gunslinger mad now.

[00:02:34]So, Universal stepped in and the rest is history. Roland Dalton, played by Peter Weller, is a Manhattan public defender who is hanging up his suit jacket for good. He's wrapping up his last case to sink into a cushy Wall Street firm run by his fiance's father. His exit plan is kind of boring [music] and missing the action, which means naturally that everything is about to go sideways. His final case involves a crack dealer named Michael [music] Jones, played by Richard Brooks, who shot and killed a plainclothes cop in Central Park and claims it was self-defense. The cop, Jones argues, wasn't there doing police work. He was robbing him. He was a blue jean cop.

[00:03:10]Dalton, being a decent guy who can't quite turn off his conscience, decides to actually dig into this rather than phone it in. What makes the setup work is the added wrinkle of the opposing [music] attorney, Susan Cantrell, played wonderfully by Patricia Charbonneau, who also happens to be Dalton's ex-girlfriend. And because Dalton is already engaged to someone else, the movie gets some real mileage out of heated sexual tension before cheerfully blowing something up. To investigate the case, Dalton teams up with Detective Richie [music] Marks, aka Sam Elliott, at his most magnificently rumpled and dangerous and rocking an earring. Marks is introduced watching one of Glickenhaus's own earlier films at the Lyric Theater in Times Square, [music] a venue the director chose specifically because it's where The Terminator had first opened years before. It's a cheeky little wink and it sets Marx up perfectly as a man living on the fringes, not particularly connected to anything or anyone. Together, Dalton and Marx pull on threads that unravel into a full-blown conspiracy, >> [music] >> a network of dirty cops, a drug lord named Nikki Carr, Antonio Huggy Bear Fargas looking right at home, and enough corruption to keep an entire precinct in designer jeans for a decade. Don't trust these people.

[00:04:17]I wish I could. I don't want to I just want to dance. It's worth thinking about [music] what Shakedown meant for Peter Weller's career at that particular moment. Robocop had dropped in 1987 and turned him into a genuine star, even if he was encased in metal for most of the runtime. He was suddenly the guy everyone was watching and his follow-up was a scrappy mid-budget New York buddy cop movie with a courtroom drama baked in the middle [music] of it.

[00:04:40]It's a fascinating choice and it actually works. Weller brings real intelligence to Roland Dalton, playing him as a man who is genuinely conflicted, someone trying to leave a job he's burned out on while being constitutionally incapable of half-assing it. There's real craft in his performance and reviewers noticed.

[00:04:56]Watching him alongside Elliott, you get the sense of two actors who genuinely enjoyed each other's company on set. The pairing is almost perversely effective.

[00:05:03]Weller is all controlled precision and Elliott is all coiled, barely restrained chaos. It shouldn't work as a duo, but it does.

[00:05:10]I know what you're thinking.

[00:05:12]You're young and fast.

[00:05:15]I'm old and slow.

[00:05:19]What are you going to do, [ __ ] Shakedown is the kind of movie that critics didn't quite know what to do with in 1988 and that modern viewers find either charming or baffling, depending on their tolerance for genre chaos. This movie genuinely does not stay in its lane. It opens as a fairly straight legal drama and then there's a blistering car chase that throws you into a full action movie mode. Then it's back to the courtroom. Then, before you can catch your breath, action erupts at Coney Island's roller coaster, which is one of the most legitimately iconic action sequences that the decade produced. Then there's a gun battle at a police evidence locker. Then the jury deliberates and there's a surprisingly effective closing argument. And then the movie remembers it still has a Learjet, a drug lord trying to flee the country, and Sam Elliott with absolutely nothing to lose. Roger Ebert, reviewing the film on opening day in 1988, described it as an assembly of sensational moments held together by a plot that provides excuses for the stunts. He called both leads strong and convincing. Gene Siskel over the Tribune was even more enthusiastic, calling it a rockling, thrilling, and funny police picture that moved with intelligence, speed, and joy. On Rotten Tomatoes today, the film sits at a 70%, which honestly undersells how much fun it actually is. One of the most underrated things about this movie is that it was shot entirely on location in New York City. It captures a version of that city that no longer exists and can't be faked on a sound stage. This is both pre-Giuliani and pre-cleanup Times Square. Clickner also grew up in New York City, knew what he had. On the Shout! Factory commentary track, he reflects on how radically the city has changed since filming and how movies like Shakedown work as accidental time capsules of an era when New York genuinely felt like anything could happen to anyone. The courtroom scenes were filmed at the historic Tweed Courthouse, named for the legendarily corrupt Tammany Hall boss William Tweed, which feels almost too on the nose for a movie about dirty cops. There's a moment where you can spot the marquee of a theater playing Nightmare on Elm Street in the background, which is the kind of authentic accidental detail no production designer could have dreamed up. The cinematography is by John Lindley, who went on to shoot such movies as Field of Dreams and Pleasantville. And even at this early stage, he knew how to make neon-soaked nights look [music] alive. Okay, we've mentioned it a few times already, but let's get to the jet. After the Coney Island roller coaster climax, which ends with a bad guy getting launched off the ride into the great unknown, the movie pivots to its final act with the kind of gleeful irrationality that you just have to respect. Drug lord Nikki Carr and dirty cop Detective Ridhal, played by Larry Joshua with a mullet, are making a break for it via private jet out of LaGuardia. Marx and Dalton commandeer a Porsche because of course they do and race to the airport. What follows is the moment that has kept Shakedown alive in the memory of everyone who ever saw it.

[00:07:52]Sam Elliott grabs onto the landing gear of the departing jet and refuses to let go. The plane takes off [music] and Marx is dangling from the wheels. He shoots out an engine and tosses a grenade. The plane, now crippled and trailing smoke, makes an emergency loop around lower Manhattan with the skyline of the city rendered in green screen behind Elliott with a cheerfulness that modern audiences might mistake for parody, but it's absolutely sincere. Marx eventually drops into the East River and the plane explodes as the two boys hug it out.

[00:08:18]After all of that, the film closes at the home of Dalton's fiance's family.

[00:08:22]Dalton has broken up with Gail and gotten back together with Susan, the ADA, and apparently staying on as a public defender because that's who he actually is. Wall Street be damned. It's an abrupt ending and it shouldn't work, but it does because Glickenhaus spent the whole film doing real character work underneath all the chaos. We know who Dalton is by this point and we know why this ending is right for him.

[00:08:43]You can't do the time, Michael.

[00:08:45]But you can take money from these 10-year-old kids and blow holes in their lives with that poison you push.

[00:08:51]Now you want to cry on my shoulder cuz you can't do the time. Stand up.

[00:08:54]Shakedown was released by Universal Pictures on May 6th, 1988 and earned $10 million at the domestic box office against a budget of roughly $6 million, making it technically profitable but not exactly a blockbuster. It came in and went without making much of a cultural dent, which is doubly strange in retrospect given how entertaining this is. For a long time, the film's home video life was similarly modest.

[00:09:16]Universal put out a DVD in 2004 with a transfer looking soft and washed out.

[00:09:20]Then Shout Factory got hold of it and released a Blu-ray of it in early 2018.

[00:09:24]The transfer is a genuine upgrade and [music] more importantly, they loaded the disc with extras that had never existed before. A new introduction recorded by Glickenhaus himself, full audio commentary with the director that goes deep into the nuts and bolts of the production, a 30-minute interview called Shakedown Breakdown, covering the film's origins, and a genuinely great short piece called Miles Over the Limit, in which Glickenhaus tells the story of how he once helped jazz legend Miles Davis out of a very 1980s kind of situation involving a Lamborghini and substances we'll leave unnamed. Every reviewer who covered this disc said the same thing.

[00:09:57]This is a definitive version of Shakedown, and it's not even close.

[00:10:00]Shakedown is never going to have the mainstream recognition of Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, or Beverly Hills Cop, and it probably never will. But among the people who have actually seen it, not just had it on them in the background, it has a grip that doesn't let go. Part of that is the New York setting, which feels increasingly precious as time goes on. Part of it is the genuine chemistry between Weller and Elliott, two actors who deserved more time together on screen than they got. And part of it is Glickenhaus's slightly unhinged willingness to put a roller coaster sequence and a green screen jet sequence in the same movie as legitimate courtroom drama, and somehow keep the whole thing from falling apart. And part of it is just that Shakedown comes from an era when action films were allowed to be weird. They were playing it straight and trusting the audience to go along for the ride, and that kind of filmmaking confidence is rarer than it should be. After Shakedown, Glickenhaus made a few more films, including McBain and Time Master, before eventually walking away from Hollywood entirely [music] to work at his father's investment firm and pursue a passion for exotic car collecting. He became very successful at both, but Shakedown remains the clearest expression of what he could do when everything clicked. Shakedown is not a perfect movie. Some of those tonal shifts are jarring if you're not ready for them. But it's a movie that rewards you for showing up. This is an '80s action cinema doing exactly what '80s action cinema was put on this earth to do, and then doing a little more on top of that just because it could. So do yourself a favor, seek it out, buy the disc if you can, turn the lights down, and pour something cold. And for the love of all things holy, don't call the cops. You want to drive?

[00:11:27]You want to shoot?

[00:11:30]I'LL DRIVE, you shoot.

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