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Shat the Movies: 80's & 90's Best Film Review

Stakeout (1987)

February 12 · 1 hr 3 min · Episode 482 · 153.1 MBExplicit
0:00-1:03:48

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This week, Shat The Movies parks the surveillance van and cracks open Stakeout, the 1987 buddy-cop hit that proved Richard Dreyfuss could be both wildly neurotic and a believable romantic lead. Gene and Big D revisit this Reagan-era crowd-pleaser to figure out how a movie about police spying on a civilian somehow became a rom-com, a workplace comedy and an action-thriller all at once.

The guys dig into Dreyfuss's escalating obsession, Emilio Estevez's mustachioed energy, and how the film casually treats stalking, harassment and undercover ethics as punchlines. They break down hot crooks, the very loose definition of "professional boundaries," and why Madeleine Stowe's character exists mostly to react to men behaving badly. Along the way, they debate whether Stakeout works because of its chemistry—or in spite of everything happening onscreen.

Is Stakeout a charming artifact from a time when movies trusted charisma over logic, or just proof that '80s law enforcement comedies lived in a completely different moral universe?

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