Taglines: When you have attitude – who needs experience?
Kuffs movie storyline. George Kuffs (Christian Slater) is an irresponsible 21-year-old high school dropout from San Francisco who walks out on his pregnant girlfriend Maya Carlton (Milla Jovovich). Having lost his last job and with no prospects he visits his brother Brad (Bruce Boxleitner), who serves as an officer in the San Francisco Patrol Special Police, a civilian auxiliary police unit that sees potential officers assign themselves specific areas and work on a for-hire basis.
Brad is not willing to loan George any money, though, and suggests George join him as a Patrol Special and work under him. Before George can decide whether to accept the offer, a man named Kane (Leon Rippy) shoots Brad in a church. George runs into the church to try to help Brad as Kane nonchalantly walks away from the scene, and Brad is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.
George is brought in for a lineup where he identifies Kane as the shooter, but things quickly go from bad to worse as the police are forced to release Kane because George did not actually see him fire the gun. Shortly after this, George is told by Captain Morino (Troy Evans), a friend of his brother’s, that Brad has died from his injuries. Morino also tells George that he has been bequeathed the district Brad patrolled.
Shortly after a local businessman named Sam Jones (George de la Pena) decides to try and purchase the district so he can control it, but George decides to keep it and train to be a police officer. Predictably, things do not go smoothly as George draws the mocking of his fellow Patrol Specials and the ire of Officer Ted Bukowsky (Tony Goldwyn), a police liaison who has been assigned to work with the Patrol Specials as punishment for having an affair with the police chief’s wife (Alexandra Paul).
After George is shot by a suicidal writer, things slowly begin to change. He reconnects with Maya, who has broken up with her new boyfriend, and then manages to kill Kane when the latter tries to ambush him at his apartment. He also cracks a huge criminal enterprise run by Sam Jones out of a Chinese dry cleaner, which gains him the respect and admiration of his fellow police.
Kuffs is a 1992 American action comedy film directed by Bruce A. Evans and produced by Raynold Gideon. It stars Christian Slater and Tony Goldwyn. The film includes Milla Jovovich in her third feature film and Ashley Judd in her film debut. The film was written directly for the screen by Evans and Gideon, both of whom had Slater in mind for the title role. The original music score is by Harold Faltermeyer. The film is set in, and was filmed around, San Francisco, California, in 1991. It involves a type of law enforcement unique to San Francisco: the Patrol Special police franchises.
Film Review for Kuffs
Sometimes the best thing a movie maker can do is just go ahead and let Christian Slater smirk. Millions of teen-age girls will feel they’re in heaven, and the rest of us at least won’t be bored; he does smirk well. But “Kuffs” carries this to a desperate extreme. Every now and then Mr. Slater turns away from the story in this comic police-action movie and talks directly into the camera. It’s no joke to say that this is the most engaging part of the film.
It takes about two seconds to figure out the target audience. At the start Mr. Slater and Milla Jovovich (last seen in “Return to the Blue Lagoon”) dance around their living room to a bouncy rock-and-roll hit of a few years back, “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.” He is wearing only sweat pants, and she is in stylish bright-colored underwear. “By the way, my name is George Kuffs,” Mr. Slater tells the camera, asking that we not be too hard on him when he dumps her because she is (quite inconspicuously) pregnant.
“Kuffs” isn’t going for maturity, which is fine. It’s also not going for originality, which means the film comes to resemble the bastard child of “Miami Vice” and an especially bad movie-of-the-week. Although George wants to evade responsibility, his brother tries to recruit him as a member of his Patrol Special force, a kind of private law-enforcement corps that works under the San Francisco police.
“I never really saw myself as a cop,” George says. “I’m more like the bad guy.” Of course, he changes his mind, for a tragic reason and with tragic results for the film. As George gets good, the movie gets bad. Mr. Slater starts saying things like, “I’m only going to stick around till I clean up the neighborhood,” which is apparently impossible to say with a smirk.
There is a sporadic, irreverent comic undercurrent that might have livened things up. The rookie George walks into a gun shop and says, “I’m looking for a really big gun that holds a lot of bullets.” The first-time director, Bruce A. Evans, might have done better to go with that tone. As it is, he takes time bombs and exploding cars so seriously!
Somewhere, there are teen-age girls waiting for Christian Slater’s every glance and teen-age boys obsessed with big guns that hold a lot of bullets. “Kuffs” is for them.
Kuffs (1992)
Directed by: Bruce A. Evans
Starring: Christian Slater, Milla Jovovich, Ric Roman Waugh, Steve Holladay, Chad Randall, Clarke Coleman, Ashley Judd, Mary Ellen Trainor, Dom Magwili
Screenplay by: Bruce A. Evans, Raynold Gideon
Production Design by: Armin Ganz, Victoria Paul
Cinematography by: Thomas Del Ruth
Film Editing by: Stephen Semel
Costume Design by: Mary E. Vogt
Set Decoration by: Claire Jenora Bowin, Diana Allen Williams
Art Direction by: Tom Davick
Music by: Harold Faltermeyer
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: January 10, 1992
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