Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Shoot To Kill

By 1988, Sidney Poitier was already an iconic legend of cinema. He had worked long and hard to get to that point, becoming the first Black man nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (for The Defiant Ones in 1958) and the first to win a few years later (for Lilies Of The Field in 1963). In 1967, he was the number one box office draw thanks to a triple play of hits: To Sir, With Love, In The Heat Of The Night and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. So you would think his return to acting after an absence of over a decade would have been a bigger deal. Perhaps if he’d chosen to make his comeback in an “important” prestige picture dripping with Oscar ambitions, it would have been. Instead, Poitier made an entertaining but fairly ridiculous thriller with the utterly generic title Shoot To Kill.

Poitier had last appeared on screen in 1977’s A Piece Of The Action, the last of three comedies he directed and costarred in with Devil And Max Devlin star Bill Cosby. Since then, he’d left acting behind to focus on directing. In 1980, he had a huge hit with the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy but his next films didn’t fare as well. He’d planned on reuniting with his two Stir Crazy stars but after Pryor declined, the script was retooled for Wilder’s future wife Gilda Radner and released as Hanky Panky. In 1985, he directed the dance picture Fast Forward. After two box office flops in a row, perhaps Poitier decided it was time to get back in front of the camera.