Who told Joe Piscopo he could act? He's not much of a comic, and he's a dreadful actor. Treat Williams has talent, but he's utterly wasted here, stumbling from one bad scene to another, with Piscopo following like a loyal dog, barking bad dialogue. As with the dreadful Forest Whitiker/Anthony Edwards cop flop Downtown, this movie suffers from exceptionally poor dialogue, and even worse direction. There are moments where you think the actors weren't even aware the camera was rolling, and other scenes where the actors are just waiting for their lines, as though the director was out to lunch or something. What could have been Lethal Weapon meets Dawn of the Dead becomes a series of predictable incidents that are more or less rehashes of previous buddy cop films. Lethal Weapon and 48hrs and Running Scared worked not because of gimmicks, but because of the characters. Dead Heat fails on every level because there was zero attention paid to script and character.
