Richard Donner is a smart producer and director.  After a lot of work in television and a few small films, he broke into the big time in 1976 with The Omen.  He followed it with Superman: the Movie.  In the mid-1980s, he was even more successful with Lethal Weapon (and followed with three sequels).

 Other films included Maverick and Conspiracy Theory.  As he has become older, he has been producing, but has broken out with 16 Blocks.

You would think audiences may be a bit tired of police thriller.  They may even be a bit tired of Bruce Willis and police thrillers.  Donner cuts his audience off at the pass and casts Willis as a weary policeman himself.  And it works.  Bruce Willis is not only a die-hard action hero, he is an interesting character actor.  His recent assassin in Lucky Number Slevin is a case in point.  Now we have him as a burnt-out case, an alcoholic detective who is unreliable and who is asked to accompany a prisoner up town, 16 blocks to the courthouse where he is to testify and expose corruption.

Much easier said than done.  He has two hours to get him there – and two hours of film running time.  It is not only the traffic which slows things down, as it does.  Soon the police are after them, corrupt police who want to silence the witness.  That, too, is easier said than done because as played by rapper Mos Def, Eddie is an incessant talker, wid a furnny and grating voice.  Even the audience would like him silenced! Bruce has to sober up more than a little and he and we are relieved that his brain is not completely sozzled.  In fact, he is ingenious in the ways he uses his wits to out-manouevre the police, especially his former partner (a smooth and sinister, David Morse).  They get into all kinds of traps and dead ends which seem impossible to escape from, but along comes a plausible plot twist and they are on their way again.  (This includes hijacking a New York City bus and crashing it.) 

While we might say we have seen it all before, we have to acknowledge that this time it is done briskly and with some wit and intelligence in the writing – and a nice twist at the end.  Although at the very end, there is a literal sweet-tooth finale that anti-sentiment types will find as having too much icing on the cake.

However, as police thrillers and pursuits go, this is not bad at all.

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