Alicia I love this movie so much

Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

stevegordon9 This Frankenheimer film is beautifully done. Jerry Beck is a troubled cop whose journey across states after a neo-Nazi killer also becomes a personal journey of self-discovery. The cast, headed by Don Johnson, is wonderfully played by all and even includes Evans Evans, John Frankenheimer's wife and widow, in a chilling performance. (Yes,you read right, her name is really Evans Evans and she was married to JF for 39 years as well as being a terrific character actress mainly through the 1960s and 1970s.) There are many other cast surprises in what is a surprisingly grippingly tense and efficient thriller. This is a great Frankenheimer film, right up there with his best. I cannot speak too highly about Don Johnson and the Nazi villain of the piece. They give this film both tension and comic relief in what are beautifully measured performances. This is an 80s classic by one of cinema's great directors.

bkoganbing I guess Don Johnson after Miami Vice wad destined to be cast as irreverent police detectives who get results which is why they are tolerated. After easy living Sonny Crockett on a houseboat in Miami Vice he does Dead Bang in which his character is working off a perpetual hangover. Soon enough he would be in Nash Bridges where he once again had a sunny disposition.On Christmas Eve Johnson catches a homicide of a patrol officer shot at point blank range. Like millions of the rest of us Johnson had plans to spend time with his family. But he figures if he's working Christmas investigating the shooting of a fellow officer no one else should be enjoying themselves. And he makes sure they don't.A convenience store manager who was shot and survived gave out a description of someone who the deceased spotted before he was killed. Following this suspect out of southern California in a tour around red state America leads Johnson on a merry chase through a variety of white supremacist groups. The object of his search is Frank Military identified by the convenience store manager who as it were is black.Johnson really steps on a lot of toes, two prime examples are Bob Balaban a parole officer whom he kidnaps Christmas Day so that he can pursue without a warrant a lead. That whole sequence including what Johnson does while interrogating his lead is hilarious.He also handles department shrink in a most unusual manner. Michael Jeter plays the psychiatrist who never encountered issues like Johnson has. I also can't forget the uptight, anal retentive FBI guy that Johnson is forced to work with, William Forsythe. Those two are one impossible team.Though it has a lot a lot humor Dead Bang also is a most serious look at a proliferation of white supremacist groups which makes the film maybe even more relevant for today.

fyhubb-01476 Made in 1989, it was ahead of it's time though slightly cliché. Filmed with a mixture of varied cast, this was a very good reflection of a real life story, where Hollywood was not trying to create a sterile environment and the characters were normal every day people with real issues that were bouncing off of each other. Some of the story line was predictable with Don Johnson sticking to his Miami Vice sense of humour but with an on-going turbulent divorce and a career dependent on a successful case, the other actors did not make it easy for Jerry Beck when his alcoholism started effecting his professionalism. Throughout the film the villains are always one step ahead, with White supremacy and anti-social behavioural traits quite accurate to life situations and personal beliefs,including religious denominations of cult Christianity, creating a network of deceit. Set in a big city leading across small towns across USA, brings out the sinister nature of true organised crime and involves the police, FBI and local sheriff's departments working with Don Johnson's Homocide department in an inhibitory way, until a crack unit enforces his efforts. Conflicts throughout were personal and not exaggerated, and understandably psychological and contextualised accurately.

Ddey65 From World War 2 through the fall of the Soviet Union, communism has been a genuine threat, but two things made the threat seem like an absolute joke; 1)Bad "Red Scare" movies of the 1950's, and 2)One exploitive Senator named Joseph McCarthy. Since the 1960's, people have used these incidents to dismiss the threat and everything connected to America's effort to fighting it. DEAD-BANG is a reminder of the first of these problems, only this Don Johnson movie attacks the far-right instead of the far-left.Don Johnson plays Jerry Beck, a Los Angeles cop investigating a murder of both a black convenience store owner, and a cop who tried to stop the people who killed him. Soon enough, he finds that the people who killed them are much worse than a bunch of two-bit losers who dress in Nazi uniforms and paraphernalia in order to feel good about themselves. But what does Beck find when he investigates a murder with racial overtones? An uncooperative police department that thinks he's losing his marbles, an uptight Born-Again Christian FBI man(William Forsythe), a police psychiatrist(Michael Jeter) who he gets into a fight with over the fact that he looked like Woody Allen, a rural Oklahoma sheriff's(William Traylor) depot that hasn't changed since 1965, a local church that's a disguised version of the World Church of the Creator, with ties to a military compound that's obviously a disguised version of the Aryan Nations.The fact that this movie slams white supremacy, yet almost all the black cops get killed fighting the right-wing militia, doesn't really say much for it. Another thing that bothers me is that Johnson's character frequently refers to the car driven by the neo-Nazis as a "maroon Ford station wagon." Perhaps if he tried looking for a maroon PONTIAC station wagon, which was the actual make of the car, he might improve his chance of finding the culprits. I can't recommend it entirely, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have something going for it.