First there was a TV show called Wanted Dead Or Alive, made in the late 1950s, with an upcoming young star named Steve McQueen playing heroic Wild West bounty hunter Josh Randall. Here, in this 1987 actioner, the events take place in modern times and Rutger Hauer's character is named Nick Randall. He is, in fact, revealed as the great-grandson of McQueen's character from the old TV show, but the link is barely mentioned and has absolutely no relevance to the plot of this film. Still, that wouldn't matter if the new and updated Wanted Dead Or Alive was any good…. maybe if the action was exciting, or the storyline had a few new ideas and angles, or even if the film as a whole had any sense of pace and purpose. But no! Wanted Dead Or Alive is an ultra-mindless, ultra-pointless offering that makes one grind one's teeth with despair.<br /><br />Ex-CIA operative Nick Randall (Rutger Hauer) now works as a lone-wolf bounty hunter in L.A. He lives in between jobs in a huge warehouse full of motorcycles and gym equipment. His knife-edge existence teeters even closer to the edge when Arab terrorist Malak Al Rahim (Gene Simmons) starts blowing up buildings and people in downtown L.A. First 140 people are slaughtered in a cinema bombing; later Rahim proposes to destroy a chemical plant, wiping out some 30,000 innocent lives in the process! One of Randall's old CIA colleagues, Philmore Walker (Robert Guillaume), approaches our moody hero and pleads with him to track down Rahim. Randall agrees, but is initially unaware that the authorities intend to double-cross him as they have reason to like him even less than the terrorist! Rahim doesn't take too kindly to the interference of this bounty hunter and kills a few of his nearest and dearest, leaving Randall so angry that he forsakes his money and goes after his adversary purely for the personal satisfaction of it….<br /><br />Wanted Dead Or Alive is a pretty awful movie on most levels. It doesn't deliver for action fans, because the action has a cheap, amateurish feel about it. It doesn't deliver for suspense fans because there is no excitement, just lots of noise and mayhem. It doesn't deliver as a "thinking-man's" thriller because of its insistence on mindlessness. And it doesn't deliver for those who fondly remember the old TV show because it has virtually nothing in common with it other than the fact that it features a bounty hunter named Randall. The script by Michael Patrick Goodman, Brian Taggert and director Gary Sherman goes nowhere - it doesn't even build up an interesting contrast between the hero and the villain. In a movie like Die Hard, which came a year later, the cat-and-mouse psychology played out between hero and villain gives the story a sense of focus and creates real tension. In this one, there's none of that….. Rahim and Randall have barely any scenes together, and their battle against each other carries no interest for the audience at all, other than an all-too-brief final showdown in which the good guy comes up with an admittedly novel way of disposing of his nemesis. Gene Simmons as the Arab terrorist looks suitably wild, but beyond that it's a nothing of a role. Hauer is similarly wasted as the hero – he wears a cool leather jacket and lives in a pretty mean bachelor pad, but that's about as deep and meaningful as the character gets! As anti-terrorism action movies go, this is one BOMB in urgent need of detonation, preferably on some island as far from intelligent civilisation as possible.