Dead Bang

Dead Bang (1989) is a hard-edged cop thriller from John Frankenheimer that you can watch online on iFILM. Don Johnson, fresh off Miami Vice, plays against type as Jerry Beck, a burned-out, hard-drinking Los Angeles homicide detective.

A police officer is gunned down on Christmas Eve, and the trail pulls Beck into a network of armed neo-Nazis plotting something far worse than a single killing. The hunt drags him across half the country while his own life falls apart around him: a divorce, weekend kids, a bottle he can't put down, and bosses who want paperwork instead of arrests. One notorious scene, where a chase leaves Beck vomiting on a suspect, has gone down as the least glamorous moment of Johnson's career.

Frankenheimer, a master of the paranoid thriller, shoots it without any gloss: grimy motels, ugly shootouts, real exhaustion. Beck isn't a slick hero but a man running on empty, and that makes the film more honest than most action pictures of its era. It's solid, gritty late-'80s genre fare. Stream Dead Bang (1989) online on iFILM.