Tommy Lee Jones in Black Moon Rising (1986)

Black Moon Rising stars Tommy Lee Jones and The Terminator’s Linda Hamilton in a story about car thieves, tough guys, and a futuristic car with jets on the back. It was released in 1986 and based on a story by John Carpenter. I’d never even heard of this movie before it became available for instant viewing on Netflix.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a crook who owes some bad people a lot of money, and he’s on the run from them. He knows he needs to get together the cash or else they’ll kill him, so in the first parts of this movie we see him break into a building. He also happens to be involved in a deal with the FBI, but they are losing patience with him just as quickly as the thugs. Later on, he winds up at a dinner party where a bunch of thieves are hauling off all the expensive cars. Among those cars is an experimental vehicle that probably looked a lot cooler in 1986 than it does now.

Linda Hamilton, who had just done The Terminator a couple years before, plays one of the main thieves who takes the experimental vehicle. She winds up befriending Jones and together they work to unravel the bosses behind their operations. What this all amounts to is a couple of car chases, some fist fights, and a little bit of shooting. This is a fairly low budget action suspense movie, typical of the mid-80’s.

I thought this was a decent movie, and what made it worth watching was Tommy Lee Jones. This is one of his earlier lead performances, and he spends a lot of the movie wisecracking to other characters. Jones has always been a solid actor and I think he fit the role pretty well. Linda Hamilton is also good as the car thief, and she rather famously goes topless for a brief love scene with Jones.

Other than the car or Linda Hamilton topless, there wasn’t too much about this movie that was memorable. It’s a decent film to watch when nothing else is on, but not something to seek out unless you are a die-hard fan of Jones or Hamilton. For a John Carpenter story, I expected a little more of a sci-fi edge, though there are a couple of really cool scenes with the car, especially one at the end of the movie.

In the end, I thought Black Moon Rising was worth seeing, but it’s not something to seek out. If you are a Netflix subscriber, you can watch it online in their Instant Viewing section. When you look at the past work of great actors like Tommy Lee Jones, it’s sometimes fun to discover movies like this that came out before they were huge stars.