Dave squares up to one of PM Entertainment’s explosive best, and ponders what could have been had Joseph Merhi got his way.
Mark (C. Thomas Howell) is an undercover cop navigating a failing marriage, a propensity for violence, and an obstinate desire to cut corners. He’s a damaged soul you see, irrevocably affected by the massacre of his Dad (Jeff Fahey) and the rest of his family when he was a boy. However, a new opportunity lands in his lap thanks to the shadowy Donald Molls (Ed Lauter) and his crew of vigilantes (awkwardly titled “Justice Incorporated”, like a bad Marvel knock-off); a throng who “exist for the sole purpose of crime management without the constraints of the legal system.”
“We sweep the trash off the streets.”
It’s a proclamation disturbingly close to the mindset of the MAGA chodes and asylum hotel ‘protesters’ camped outside a Travelodge in Billericay today – but then PM Entertainment’s intentions were hardly about prescient social commentary.
They just wanted to blow shit up.
And in THE SWEEPER (1996) they do that with aplomb.
Joseph Merhi’s film sits comfortably at the top tier of his company’s canon. That said, prior to shooting, this action spectacular was in desperate need of a little more oomph.
Enter screenwriter Bill Applegate:
“I replaced a guy on a film called Jacobsen Hart,” recalls Applegate. “It was good, but Merhi had asked if I could pump up the action scenes, so I came up with a couple of sequences that he really liked; the guy on the building dangling from the rope for example, as well as a few others.”
It worked – and although The Sweeper is prone to a languid pace from time to time, as a goateed Howell pensively ponders the morality of Lauter’s diabolical organisation, the bangs and booms are without equal.
“The Sweeper represented another step up in the action genre for us at PM,” cinematographer Ken Blakey told City on Fire. “The opening car chase on the pier, the night freeway extravaganza, and then the day freeway chase where C. Thomas Howell climbs onto the wheel of an in-flight airplane out of a moving convertible are all still amazing. For those freeway chases we were using nine cameras at any given time. Four or five operated cameras shooting from camera cars as well as telephoto shots to stack up the action. That was in addition to four or five Eyemos which are small 35mm cameras housed in indestructible steel boxes that are placed and disguised on the road. That’s how we get those shots where the exploding car lands on the camera.” [1]
When you consider that six or seven years prior, Pepin and Merhi were shooting for pennies on 16mm, The Sweeper is the perfect example of how far this pair had come. Could they have ever crossed over and made an impact at the box office?
Sadly, I think they peaked a little too late for that. Time was rapidly moving on and action was becoming outmoded, particularly post-9/11.
Nevertheless, when you hear Jeff Fahey talk about the type of project that Merhi was considering next, you never really know. Fahey’s appearance in The Sweeper is a curious one, playing Howell’s soon-to-be deceased papa in a flashback sequence.
“I did it as a favour to Joe,” Fahey told The Buffalo News, just after the picture wrapped. However, Fahey had an eye on a different project Merhi was circling: a prestige film by Robert Downey Sr., which unfortunately never got made.
“A group of my friends – Robert Downey Jr., Cathy Moriarty, Sean Penn, Alan Arkin, Cameron Diaz – want to do it. We’d play small roles. It all takes place in a single day. It’s a bizarre, wild thing. We’re hoping to do it soon. I’ll be able to do my role on weekends.” [2]
Sean Penn and Cameron Diaz in a ‘classy’ PM Entertainment movie?
That would have brought the big time.
[1] COF Presents: PM Entertainment’s Kickboxing Noir by Michael Retter, 19th March 2019.
[2] Jeff Fahey: Hard-Working Lawman by Alan Pergament, The Buffalo News, 23rd August 1995.
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