Nighthawks (1981) on Netflix

R19811h 39mAction Crime Thriller

Deke DaSilva and Matthew Fox, NYPD detectives, join an anti-terrorist squad when the terrorist Wulfgar brings his campaign to New York. British expert Peter Hartman trains them to hunt him.

Netflix3.4/5
IMDb6.3/1023,906 votes
Rotten Tomatoes72%

Trailer

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Plot summary

Deke DaSilva works undercover with the NYPD Street Crimes Unit, partnered with Matthew Fox, and is separated from his wife Irene. In London, the terrorist-for-hire Heymar Reinhardt, called Wulfgar, bombs a department store and kills the police officers sent to arrest him. He travels to Paris, where his partner Shakka tells him his handlers have turned away because the bombing killed children. Wulfgar has his face altered and moves his campaign to New York. The NYPD forms the Anti-Terrorist Action Command and assigns DaSilva and Fox to it, alongside the British investigator Peter Hartman. Hartman doubts that American officers can be ruthless enough against Wulfgar, and he and DaSilva clash. DaSilva resists the idea of killing Wulfgar, but absorbs the training and begins to understand his target.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Nighthawks (1981)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

For the Roosevelt Island Tramway scene, Stallone hung from the cable car with a folding Gerber knife in his left hand, ready to cut himself free from the harness if the cable snapped during a 230-foot fall into the East River, whose current ran eight miles an hour; stretched out, the cable weighed over 300 lb.
SPOILER
Rutger Hauer's first day on Nighthawks was his death scene, where he was hurt twice: a squib meant to simulate a gunshot exploded on the wrong side and severely burned him, and a cable yanking him to mimic being shot was pulled too hard, straining his back; Hauer learned the cable was pulled on Stallone's order.
SPOILER
Universal and the MPAA cut violence before release: a longer disco shootout was trimmed, and Wulfgar's death was reduced from six shots and a graphic headshot, made with an animatronic head by makeup artist Dick Smith, to a heavily shortened sequence.
Rutger Hauer made his American film debut as the terrorist Wulfgar, turning down a better-paying part in Franklin J. Schaffner's 1981 adventure film Sphinx to take the role.
Director Gary Nelson, who had made Freaky Friday and The Black Hole for Disney, was dismissed after a week of production on Nighthawks and went uncredited; his replacement, Bruce Malmuth, was recommended to Stallone by Rocky director John G. Avildsen.
The London department store blown up at the start of the film was Arding & Hobbs in Clapham Junction, then owned by the Allders group; the building is now owned by Debenhams, and during the 2011 England riots its windows were smashed again.
David Shaber's script began as a third French Connection film, pairing Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle with a wisecracking cop possibly played by Richard Pryor; after Hackman proved reluctant, 20th Century Fox sold the script to Universal, where Shaber reworked it into Nighthawks.
Two cuts of Nighthawks were test screened, one favoring Stallone's character Deke DaSilva and the other Hauer's; audiences preferred the Hauer version, yet Stallone, who had a hand in re-editing, still removed some of Hauer's scenes from the final film, according to Frank Sanello's book Stallone: A Rocky Life.