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THE BANKER
Rating: 
USA. 1989.
Director/Producer – William Webb, Screenplay – Dana Augustine, Story – Dana Augustine, William Webb & Richard Brandes, Photography – John Huneck, Music – Reg Powell & Sam Winans, Production Design – James Shumaker. Production Company – Westwind.
Cast:
Robert Forster (Sergeant Daniel Jefferson), Duncan Regehr (Spaulding Osborne), Shanna Reed (Sharon Maxwell), Jeff Conaway (Francis ‘Cowboy’ Mulvehill), Juan Garcia (Eddie Garcia), Richard Roundtree (Lieutenant Lloyd Hughes)
Plot: Millionaire banker Spaulding Osbourne relieves the tensions of the high-pressure business world by going out and hunting human victims with a crossbow.
The idea of an investment banker leaving the corporate conference room to do a spot of manhunting is an appealing one. There’s an ingenuity to the concept behind the film – one that takes the parasitic ruthlessness of corporate greed to its extreme. After seeing Michael Douglas in Wall Street (1987), this surely seemed the logical next step. The script even rises to the occasion by throwing in an interesting series of analogies between the verdant and the concrete jungles and between the cutthroat nature of corporate business and the rituals of the hunt.
But the film is never as good as its central idea – indeed as the title character Duncan Regehr is never actually shown ever conducting the film’s titular profession. Instead it uninterestingly winds its way through the run of the psycho/slasher film cliches, all with a requisite amount of gratuitous nudity, to finally arrive at a predictable end. It has its occasionally amusing moments – at one point Jeff Conaway is caught while being pursued by Duncan Regehr, begs for a second chance and is given the opportunity to recite the names of the Seven Dwarves, but gets it wrong and is blown up by an incendiary crossbow bolt – but the rest is disappointingly mundane. But the film trades most of these possibilties for routine subplots dealing with Shanna Reed’s tv campaign and a wholly mundane police procedural.
Robert Forster gives an atypically dogged and tired performance as the pursuing detectrive. And Duncan Regehr, a prize over-actor at the best of times, regrettably turns the polish of the business-suit into a role that comes out more like a camp Rambo.
With a worthwhile script and most certainly a better director attached to it, this is a film that could have been as ingenious as The Stepfather (1987). A better version of the same idea was conducted in American Psycho (2000).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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