Striking Distance is a 1993 action thriller directed and co-written by Rowdy Herrington, and it is exactly the kind of film the decade specialised in: drama, action, betrayal, and absolutely no interest in making complete sense. Bruce Willis stars as Tom Hardy, a Pittsburgh cop demoted to the river rescue squad, alongside a genuinely stacked supporting cast including Sarah Jessica Parker, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore, Robert Pastorelli, and John Mahoney. I had a ridiculous amount of fun with it, and I say that fully aware that it is not, by any measure, a good film.Let me try to explain the plot, because it's a masterpiece of overcomplication. Willis is a cop who sleeps with his new partner, who turns out to be an undercover officer secretly investigating him. She's investigating him because his uncle knows that his own son, Tom's cousin, believed to have died jumping off a bridge, is in fact alive, and has quietly covered for him. And the knot that ties it all together: it was the uncle himself who killed Tom's father during the original chase, to stop him shooting the escaping son, and then buried the truth. The cousin, meanwhile, is the one murdering Tom's ex-girlfriends and dumping the bodies in the river to frame Tom for it. There is also a cat, who lives on Tom's houseboat and is arguably the most stable character in the film. If you followed all of that on the first pass, you did better than the original test audiences, who found it so confusing the studio ordered reshoots.The real star of the show, though, is Bruce Willis doing the three things he does better than anyone: shouting, shooting, and talking in a low, gravelly whisper to signal that he is a serious man handling serious matters. He rotates through these three modes for the entire runtime, and it never stops being entertaining. It's a distilled dose of peak-era Willis screen presence, and it carries a lot of weight that the script cannot.The behind-the-scenes story is almost more entertaining than the film itself. Willis reportedly hated making it and blamed the director for the trouble. After the initial cut tested poorly, the production went back for extensive reshoots, including redoing the romance scenes specifically to make them sexier, and the title was changed from Three Rivers to the punchier Striking Distance. My favourite artefact of all this chaos is a genuine continuity goof: during the climactic underwater fight, there are two brief shots where Willis is suddenly and completely bald, his wig having apparently clocked off mid-scene. Once you know it's there, it's impossible not to watch for it.The action is gloriously overcooked in the way only nineties thrillers manage. Cars detonate the instant anything touches them, a flare gun is deployed with sniper-grade precision, and the laws of physics are treated as polite suggestions. None of it holds up to a second of scrutiny, and none of it needs to.I won't pretend this is anything other than what it is. Roger Ebert took it apart, and critically it has a dreadful reputation. The plot is nonsense and the whole thing runs on melodrama and momentum. But I enjoyed every silly minute, and there's real value in a film that delivers this much unpretentious, high-octane, deeply nineties entertainment. Go in for the chaos, not the coherence.