Moving Target

Moving Target has just about everything you could want in a movie: Chynna Phillips, Jason Bateman, Tom Skerritt, John Glover, Jack Wagner, Robert Downey Sr., a teenage band that sounds like seven session musicians improvising a song for a cheesy movie soundtrack with no singer. A hit man that dresses like a character in a Miami Vice/Saved by the Bell crossover and who decides to gun down a family from a suburban rooftop with an uzi.

This is the perfect example of Made-for-TV 80s. Nothing about it bears any resemblence to reality, and yet you know all these characters as soon as you see them. Cliches cultivated by pop culture, that never actually existed. But you know them and you love them. Admit it.

 

You get great dialog like: "Hey, open up, you little pencil head!" and "I wanna be here with these zoids only marginally more than I want to die of malaria." In other words, it's just like kids really talked in 1988.

On top of Tom Skerritt, all covered with talent.

Jason Bateman is a heroic teenage musician who, after finding a hot young Chynna Phillips to temporarily replace him in his "next big thing" teen band, gets sent to summer music camp while he family is swept up in mob related intrigue. Bateman runs away from camp, only to find his family has suddenly moved in his absence. Suddenly people are trying to capture and/or kill. But he sticks it to the man AND he plays fruity Baroque piano.

His best friend at music camp is a black nerd, of course, who says cool stuff like, "Man, you got trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for big problems"

All in all, this film isn't going to blow you away, but is full of goofy 80s music, goofy 80s hair, goofy 80s clothes. Watch it while drunk with a bunch of friends who really love the 80s.

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