Best Seller (DVD 2002)

John Flynn has directed some good, tough, pacy thrillers and Best Seller, along with the 1973 The Outfit, can claim to be the best of them. It kicks off with not one but two slam-bang action sequences and then, having grabbed our attention, pitches us straight into its twisty plot premise. Brian Dennehy, reliably watchable as ever, plays an ageing cop-turned-novelist who has hit a writer's block since his wife died. James Woods at his most suavely sinister is a hitman with dirt to dish on the head of a big corporation. Woods proposes a Faustian pact. He provides Dennehy with the full crooked story on the mobster-turned-corporate boss and the cop writes it up. Dennehy gets a best seller; Woods gets his revenge and comes out looking like a hero.
The dialogue, courtesy of screenwriter and horror-movie director Larry Cohen (It's Alive; Q--The Winged Serpent), is satisfyingly hard-boiled and slips in plenty of subversive sideswipes at rampant capitalism. ("It's the American Way, Dennis," says Woods, detailing how he helped his boss rise via robbery and murder. "I'm a businessman, an executive.") This certainly isn't the only movie to get mileage out of the symbiotic relationship between cop and crook (see Michael Mann's Heat), but it works several neat variations on the theme, with Dennehy and Woods both at the top of their respective forms. If the film never quite lives up to its potential--the required final confrontation between the two principals doesn't materialise and Victoria Tennant is thrown away as Dennehy's love-interest--it remains a way better than average thriller with its roots deep in the best B-movie traditions.

Best Seller is a bit of an old fashioned thriller. Which means no kung-fu, no twin pistol weilding and no slaughtering mooks by the dozen.
In this case this is a good thing as it leaves room for smart diaglogue and a great double-act of James Woods and Brian Denneghy as a cop ,Meechum, and a killer, Cleve, who work together to bring down the killer's old boss.
This isn't a buddy pic, Denneghy's character loathes Cleve and with good reason as he is an arrogant, vicious, self-obsessed pyschopath. Luckily he is played by Woods who makes him into an incredibly cool, arrogant, vicious, self-obsessed pyschopath. One who you can't help liking even as he murders his way through his bosses minions.
Cleve takes Meechum through his bloody history of killing so Meechum can write a book about it and expose his boss. There is murder, chase scenes, very dark humour and the two leads striking sparks of each other in a bravura acting display.
The ending left me a little disapointed but fundamentally this is a smart, cool and genuinely THRILLING thriller