A Killer Thriller With Rental-Store Teeth

Read Time:5 Minute, 47 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Relentless (Retro VHS Packaging)
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Genre: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Crime
Year Released: 1989, 2026 Blu-ray
Runtime: 1h 32m
Director(s): William Lustig
Writer(s): Phil Alden Robinson, writing as Jack T.D. Robinson
Cast: Judd Nelson, Robert Loggia, Leo Rossi, Meg Foster, Patrick O’Bryan, Ken Lerner, Mindy Seeger, Beau Starr, Angel Tompkins, Ron Taylor, Roy Brocksmith, Frank Pesce, Edward Bunker
Where to Watch: available July 28, 2026, pre-order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: RELENTLESS belongs to that late-80s style school of thrillers where a pay phone, a loose-cannon detective, and a killer with daddy issues can carry an entire feature without apology. It isn’t subtle, and it isn’t reinventing the thriller genre. It’s a lean, mean genre piece with just enough personality to keep its formula from feeling disposable. The title promises more than the movie can always deliver, but director William Lustig keeps things moving in a way that the weaker pieces rarely do.

The setup is as straightforward as these films often were. Arthur “Buck” Taylor, played by Judd Nelson, wanted to join the LAPD and didn’t make it past the psychological evaluation. Rejection curdles into revenge, and Buck starts killing people selected from the phone book while two Los Angeles detectives try to catch up. Robert Loggia plays veteran detective Bill Malloy, while Leo Rossi plays Sam Dietz, the newer, more aggressive partner who pushes hard even when the case starts pushing back.

The phone-book angle gives the murders a sense of randomness that won’t necessarily connect with younger audiences. Anyone with a listed number can become a target, making spaces feel less safe than the film’s budget might otherwise allow. At the same time, the script doesn’t always dig far enough into that terror. It finds the hook, uses it, and then settles into more familiar detective cliches.

Judd Nelson is the main reason the movie works. Buck could’ve been a basic movie maniac, but Nelson gives him a twitchy, wounded, ugly intensity that feels different from his better-known screen image. He doesn’t play Buck as smoothly. He plays him as someone locked in permanent adolescence, still trying to win approval from a father whose approval was poisonous in the first place. The flashbacks are heavy-handed, but they explain the damage without asking the audience to excuse him.

Those father-son elements are where RELENTLESS gets most interesting. Buck’s rage isn’t random to him, even if his victims are. He’s a failed candidate for the very institution he’s now attacking, and that gives the movie a perfect little twist. He knows enough about police procedure to be dangerous, but not enough about himself to stop turning humiliation into violence. Lustig doesn’t overplay the psychology, yet he gives Nelson enough room to make Buck more unsettling than the script alone might have managed.

The detective side is more structured than it is surprising. Loggia brings the weary authority that can make routine dialogue feel lived-in. Malloy has seen enough crime, enough dead ends, and enough grandstanding to know when energy is useful and when it’s just noise. Rossi’s Dietz is cocky, impatient, and ready to charge through a case with his jaw set. Their partnership has its friction, but Loggia and Rossi make it watchable because neither actor treats the material as a prestige drama. They know the assignment, and they keep the pressure on, keep the banter moving, and let the case pull the personalities into sharper focus.

Meg Foster doesn’t get as much to do as the film needs her to. As Carol Dietz, she brings warmth and presence, and her screen presence is impossible to ignore, but the role mostly exists to give Dietz a home life and raise the personal stakes. RELENTLESS is far more invested in Buck, Malloy, and Dietz than in Carol as a character. Foster makes the most of limited space, though the movie’s final stretch reminds you how often thrillers of this period used wives as emotional leverage instead of letting them shape the story.

The downside is that RELENTLESS keeps retreating to safer ground. It has the pieces for something more memorable. A killer rejected by the police, a city where anonymity becomes a death sentence, detectives chasing someone who understands their habits, and a performance from Nelson that feels like it wandered in from a stranger, darker movie. Instead of pushing those ideas, the film often lets procedure take over. Clues are followed, tensions rise, warnings are ignored, and the last act heads where plenty of similar thrillers were heading.

RELENTLESS benefits from arriving just before serial-killer thrillers shifted into a more profiler-heavy mode in the 1990s. This one still belongs to the older street-level detective tradition. The cops don’t solve cases through grand behavioral theory. They chase, argue, react, and stumble toward the end with pressure and instinct.

RELENTLESS is too familiar to hit harder than it does, and the finale doesn’t escape the expected traps. Even so, there’s enough here to recommend it to fans of late-80s crime thrillers, especially those curious to see Nelson play against type with real commitment. Loggia gives it something to latch onto, Rossi gives it motion, Foster gives it more presence than the writing offers, and Lustig keeps the whole thing moving with enough confidence to make a standard chase feel worth following. It may not live up to its title, but it’s persistent enough.

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