Phil Hubbs So you made a film back in the day and it was a success both at the cinema and videoshop. The two stars of the movie are still big and can still pull in an audience, you yourself now have some swing within Hollywood and lets be honest...you need a new project to keep your career on a high-ish. What better way to do that than completely rehashing your successful movie by...errr completely remaking it all over again but in a different location and with a new star (for the time) to the roster.Yep so the plot is virtually the same as the first movie, no shame here folks. The dynamic duo are back again and instructed to go on another stakeout in a nice woody lakeside well to do area. They are watching out for a witness against the mafia (after a botched assassination) who may or may not be coming to this lovely house. But the funny thing is...wait for it...this time they have a female DA officer along with them to play husband and wife with Dreyfuss. That's not all, she's brought her huge rottweiler along too...ey up we're in for some mighty big laughs now! Did I mention the new DA officer is Rosie O'Donnell? well there you go. I ask you...can you think of anything better than this? really...how can this not be funny?Oh wait...its not funny in the slightest. Everything here has been dumbed down and made more family friendly basically, not that the original movie was an adult movie but this is just childish. Most of the plot now revolves around how silly this family unit can be with Estevez as the son, Dreyfuss as the dad and O'Donnell as the mum. Every scene is pretty much an embarrassing bumbling slapstick comedy routine with infantile dialog and clichéd predictable visual gags...some of which naturally revolve around the big dog. Literately nothing happens for the majority of the movie until the final long dinner sequence where there is lots more awful dialog. Heck even the action (if you can even call it that...which you can't) is weak as f*ck, its virtually a children's movie at times.Dreyfuss character seems to have been somewhat neutered this time around and doesn't have the same zest as before. Yes he is obviously an older character but the plot doesn't allow him to do anything. The same goes for Estevez, in the first movie he was pretty much a sidekick, here he has a little more to do admittedly but again its very lame and uninteresting really. Its nice to see Ferrer playing a bad guy again, haven't seen that for awhile, blast from the past. The only problem being like everything else its a very tame watered down role which has absolutely no bite about it. The bad guys in this movie are so uneventful I can hardly bring myself to call them bad guys, they're just a bit naughty and they wear black. As for O'Donnell well this was another time wasn't it, a different ear where O'Donnell was actually kinda big (in both senses...zing!). I guess she adds to the humour at times but her character just comes across like this sequel...not required, horseshoed in, crowbarred in, forced and pointless.I really don't know what Badham was trying to do here, you could have a sequel to this but going down this route was a huge error. Basically remaking it with one extra cop for comedy relief...oh and a big dog...pfft! I mean really, who wants to see Dreyfuss' character have relationship issues (again) with Stowe (from the first movie, must have needed rent money) whilst staking out Dennis Farina who does nothing. Then in the background Estevez is constantly moaning about having to shave his moustache off which appears to be the movies main gag. This literately is like watching an actual stakeout where nothing actually happens, I'm boring myself writing this!2/10

johnnyboyz I have this idea of police stakeouts being tiring, laborious things; endless hours, even days, of waiting and waiting for the slightest thing which may not even be of any necessity. I imagine a figure at the forefront of these investigations of immense patience, perhaps a rough but almost always methodical looking individual with the ability to sit and stare; to sit and watch; to ride the storm of sometimes absolutely nothing at all if it means wading out of the other end with something that'll help in the long run. Alas, 1993's Another Stakeout seems to think otherwise; an often loud, often brash and almost constantly unfunny movie dealing with the above like a Looney Tunes cartoon would the issue of hunting rabbits.The film is the sequel to a fun buddy comedy from a few years previously; a film entitled "Stakeout", and, if like me, you use minimal effort to read into where the brainstorming started in order to come up with such a title for this second film, you'll probably deduce that a third entry would've read something like: "YET Another Stakeout". Such a title, albeit hypothetical to a film that does not exist, conjures up a sense of the laborious; of the necessary although undesirable, and therein we deduce the gradual arc of the nature of both where these films MAY have gone, and where we're at with this particular entry. At the core of it is this comedic black hole is a threesome consisting of: Rosie O'Donnell; Emile Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss. Veterans of the first Stakeout film will identify two of the said three, Estevez and Dreyfuss, who respectively played police officers Bill Reimers and Chris Lecce. Veterans will also recall how well they combined in the middle of a tale which very gradually built into a menacing reality as Dreyfuss' character underwent a few changes in regards to his attitudes towards women and the true extent of their actual case blew wide open.These three are called upon to watch over a specific house in an easy-on-the-eye locale in the American city of Seattle; the reason being that it is home to a missing young woman named Luella Delano (Moriarty), whose testimony to an ugly recent incident involving innocents and police officers in Las Vegas caught up in a killing spree is paramount in nailing some crooks. In the meantime, however, the residence houses her parents: Dennis Farina's Brian O'Hara and his wife Pam (Strassman). The set up is simple: if she turns up at her family home, then the police have her and those who instigated the aforementioned Nevada chaos go down. But all of this is largely irrelevant for the duration of the film, as our leads slot into a facade of being the new next door neighbours and begin to engage in a series of wacky encounters built purely on the fact O'Donnell has brought her dog along with her and that Dreyfuss is a little miffed at being framed as his co-workers' husband/son as cover. There is a moment where the pseudo family are invited over for dinner, in what should be a centrepiece of comedy running on binary opposition and falsified stories (from both sides) as the O'Hara's try to cover up their daughter's situation and our leads disguise their policing backgrounds. But it runs aground; it doesn't get going. It begins to rely on that sharp pain one gets in the head when one devours ice cream too quickly.Depressingly, the film goes on to undo all of the good work from the first. Gone are the lessons Dreyfuss learnt, his relationship with Madeleine Stowe's Maria character, of whom was central to the stakeout in the first, is on the brink of terminating and Dreyfuss comes across as all of a sudden obnoxious and unlikeable. Gone too is any sort of rapport between the leads, with the majority of it just three people in a room shouting at each other. Where things worked in the first film, things collapse two-fold here; the sense that these people are at all qualified police officers worthy of the job they're on is suddenly all-but-lost, while the producer's decision to throw in O'Donnell reeks of a panic whereby going bigger and "better" is suddenly the solution to a problem that never existed.If ever there was an opportunity for a film of this ilk to drive forward with drama and heightened tension, it would be in a situation whereby the restricted view of an area we're aware the importance of is at the forefront of proceedings. In this scenario, a sense of cinema relies on facial expressions; "the image" and, if anything, a LACK of dialogue so as to not distract from the ensuing drama. One's mind boggles at a certain scene whereby Estevez charts the bathroom habits of his newly acquired targets, talking to himself in the process and using specific buzzwords more broadly linked to these excretal activities. It is quite incredible that a fully grown adult was even responsible for the construction of the sequence. And so, the film is a rank failure; one of those rare instances whereby the psychopath who pops up at the end to kill everyone actually gets our vote of approval to just do away with everyone. 2007 German film "The Lives of Others" was a pinnacle of sorts in its depiction of this clandestine world of observing and reporting; of swimming through the trouble of a delicate scenario; of getting under the skin and into the heads of those directly involved in both the observer and the observed. Here, Another Stakeout is the playground humour-ridden mess taking a premise not too dissimilar to the above and turning it into a recipe for unfunny chaos.

John Christopher Lukeman Before we get started, a little caveat for the reader: this may not be the easiest film to find. Your standard video rental outlets will be hit or miss, as well as libraries. Your best bet will be an online rental service or a strong and fervent prayer. But if you ask me, it is worth it. You may also be scratching your head at the biographical information above. Why should you care about a 1993 sequel to a forgettable buddy cop flick?Simple. It is a great film. Not only has it obviously influenced many contemporary films, but it also trumps these films on a variety of levels. Allow me to elaborate…Prior to Another Stakeout, John Badham made a handful a good films (Wargames, Short Circuit). Shortly thereafter he helmed an unfortunate number of Hollywood films (American Flyers, Point of No Return) that may be considered guilty pleasures at best. He was also called upon by fellow director Peter Jackson to head up the second unit on all three Lord of the Rings films but declined. So what is the point of this little history lesson? Hollywood kills good directors (John Woo and Sam Raimi, prime examples).But, I digress. Despite the a lackluster couple of decades, John Badham does have a grand if only marginally well known legacy in Another Stakeout. Science fiction and horror fans will recognize and appreciate the premise; Detective Chris Lecce (Richard Dreyfuss) wakes up one day, goes through the motions like any and every other day, and slowly realizes that he is, inexplicably, on another stakeout. The scenario plays out basically as is expected but it is the manner of the presentation and plotting that make it remarkable.The film ultimately has only three characters, whose dynamic, touches on Alfred Hitchcock and Shakespeare without any pretense. Chris' subtle and deliberate decline into the reality of his new position in the world leads to him swinging from disbelief to depression to mania to megalomania to acceptance and back to disbelief. The storytelling and character interaction allow for empathy without distraction and the science fiction elements are beautifully woven into the fabric of the drama so that the one doesn't overshadow the other.There are several mysteries involved in the story that are revealed with wonderful precision by the director through a series of well placed flashbacks and the subtlety of mood and movement, but you'll have to find the film and watch it to understand the full glory.This is not a flashy film. It is however a master stroke. It is unfortunate that this film has all but vanished into obscurity, along with its director but they both still exist and there's always a second wind. Always.

joycehm2004 Having just seen "Another Stakeout" for the first time since 1995, I decided to check out the online info about the locations that were used in the movie and, so far, haven't seen any credit given for the island off the BC coast where most of the filming was done. It was filmed on beautiful Bowen Island, a 15 minute ferry trip from Horseshoe Bay, just to the northwest of Vancouver. The initial scenes involving driving off the ferry were done in Snug Cove (they substituted the name 'Bainbridge Island'), and most of the exterior and interior shots were on the south side of the island in an area called Fairweather where, as you saw or will see in the film, the homes are gorgeous and perfectly suited for the plot (however meager you thought it to be). I've seen a number of comments about the filming having been done on an island in Puget Sound. A lot was shot in Seattle, but the majority was on Bowen Island - I should know - I was living there at the time. Just thought I'd set the record straight. (You can see the homes used for filming clearly on Google Earth, if you're interested.)