'Bird On A Wire' --A Review

I'm kicking it old school this week and going back all the way to 1990 to review the Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn thriller Bird On A Wire.   I stumbled across it randomly one morning on Encore and was so tickled to see it again, that I sat down and watched the whole damn thing over again, just for kicks.   To me, Bird On A Wire falls into that broad category along with movies like The Firm and The Pelican Brief that were genuinely decent to good movies that you might not actually run out and buy, but you'd probably sit down and watch them if you came across them randomly on television.

And surprisingly, Bird On A Wire holds up pretty well, even after these years.   Mel Gibson (you know, I kind of miss the Mel Gibson of the late 80s, early 90s before the crazy hit.   He should uncrazy himself and hook up with someone cool like Tarantino and get back into things.)  is Rick Jarmin, a small time drug dealer who helped put a crooked FBI agent, Sorenson (David Carradine) behind bars and has spent fifteen years in Federal witness protection.   He runs across his former fiancee Marianne (Goldie Hawn) at a Detroit gas station and soon, thanks to the help of a crooked FBI agent Weyburn (Stephen Tobolowsky) who is in league with the now released Sorenson and his goons, his pleasant, quiet life at the gas station is in flames (literally) and he and Marianne and reunited and on the run-with Rick getting shot in the butt for his troubles.

From Detroit, Marianne and Rick head across Lake Michigan to Racine to one of Rick's prior cover jobs (as a hairdresser) where he retrieves his address book to find his original FBI contact who got him into witness protection (who is now retired.)   From Racine, they make their way to yet another of Rick's prior lives, a farm somewhere in Wisconsin, where Rick and Marianne meet a former girlfriend of his, Rachel.   The goons catch up to them and after a shoot out and a brief helicopter versus crop duster battle, they flee again, heading this time toward St. Louis to hopefully clear this up once and for all.

Obviously (and perhaps inevitably) Marianne and Rick renew their romance but eventually, upon reaching St. Louis they discover that Rick's original FBI contact has developed Alzheimer's and doesn't remember who Rick is (or kind of does- either way, he's not much help) but he does remind Rick that he used to work at the local zoo and maybe that would be a good place to lead the goons too, as Rick knows his way around the place and would have the advantage.  Sure enough, Rick and Marianne have a climactic confrontation at the zoo involving waterfalls, lions, tigers, monkeys, pirhanas and pretty much everything else you can imagine.  Rick ends up dangling on a wire over a large cat pit and Marianne (when offered incentive of the happy ending she and Rick almost had fifteen years before) eventually retrieves him and they sail off into the sunset on a yacht named Mr. Wiggly. 

Overall:  This is a good 'there's nothing else on television' type of movie to watch and despite the general weirdness of having a thriller go from Detroit through Wisconsin and end up in St. Louis (hardly the exotic locale you usually expect in these types of movies).  Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn bounce nicely off of each other, the music is awesomely late 80s and early 90s and as always seems to happen in these movies, they sail off into the sunset on a yacht.   A pleasant blast from the past- but hardly Oscar winning material either.  ** 1/2 out of ****