Unlawful Entry (film)

Unlawful Entry is a 1992 American psychological thriller film directed by Jonathan Kaplan, and starring Kurt Russell, Madeleine Stowe and Ray Liotta.

The film involves a couple who befriend a lonely policeman, only for him to develop an unrequited fixation on the wife, leading to chilling consequences. The movie received generally positive reviews especially for Ray Liotta's performance who was nominated for an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain in 1993 for his portrayal of the psychopathic cop. The film was remade in Bollywood as Fareb in 1996.

Plot
One night, an intruder enters Michael and Karen Carr's upscale Los Angeles home. Karen is briefly taken hostage at knifepoint before the burglar escapes. Police arrive and one officer, Pete Davis, takes an extra interest in their case due to their considerate approach. He later cuts through departmental red tape and helps install a security system in their house. Appreciating Pete's assistance, the Carrs befriend him.

When Michael expresses interest in getting revenge on the intruder, Pete invites him on a ride-along with him and his partner, Roy Cole. After dropping Cole off, Pete reveals he has arrested the burglar who invaded the Carrs' house. He offers Michael an opportunity to retaliate for the attack on Karen. Michael declines, and admits he wasn't serious about personally taking revenge, but Pete becomes insistent and demanding. When the burglar attempts escape, Pete brutally beats him before Michael orders him to stop, much to Pete's confusion.

Distrusting Pete's emotional instability and overprotective behavior, Michael implores Karen to avoid him, though Karen believes Michael is overreacting. When Pete arrives at Michael's club, Michael condemns Pete's behavior and demands he stay away from him and Karen, which results in Pete being furious and feeling betrayed, as he believed he was sincerely helping Michael. After Pete unsuccessfully attempts to cope via sex with a random woman, Pete invites Karen for coffee in an attempt to connect to her and begins intruding in her marriage with Michael, believing that Michael is too weak and cowardly to stand up for Karen.

Having become jealous and bitter over Michael's rejection of their short-lived friendship, Pete harasses him by damaging his finances, and breaks into their house at night. When Michael files a complaint against Pete's behavior, Pete uses his police connections to destroy Michael's business reputation, encountering bemused apathy from his own LAPD superiors. Advised by his lawyer, Michael tries bribing Pete with $5000 and apologizes for his rejection, but Pete rejects Michael's offer and reveals his obsession with Karen, while declaring he would rather kill Michael than arrest him. Michael warns Karen about Pete's obsession and demands she stay away from him. When Michael turns to Roy Cole for help, Cole orders his partner to seek psychiatric help or be suspended. Instead, Pete murders Cole, by blaming it on a known criminal and then plants cocaine in the Carrs' house to frame Michael, enabling him to pursue Karen. Jeopardizing his attorney's finances, Michael resolves to get out on bail and handle matters himself.

Back at the Carr house, Karen awakens to find Pete, rather than her friend, Penny, cooking breakfast. After Pete declares he loves Karen, she discovers Penny's corpse. Karen pretends she loves Pete to confiscate his gun. Karen attempts to shoot him, but the gun is empty. Dismissing her as worthless, an enraged Pete attempts to rape her but fails. After finding his police car vandalized, he realizes that Michael has returned home. The couple attempt escape, but while Karen hides in the bathroom, Pete attacks Michael and accidentally alerts the security company. Posing as Michael on the phone, Pete attempts to cancel the emergency response, but gives the wrong security code, unaware Michael changed it. Pete threatens to kill Michael unless Karen escapes with him, but Karen strikes Pete in the face, allowing Michael to knock him down the stairs.

While the couple waits for police to arrive, Pete regains consciousness as Michael holds him at gunpoint. Pete, convinced Michael will not shoot him, tauntingly asks Michael if he'll arrest him, unknowingly asking the same question Michael asked him in their earlier confrontation. To Pete's shock, Michael chooses to shoot him to death, and he and Karen then go outside to await police.

Development
On April 26, 1991, Daily Variety reported that Largo Entertainment's upcoming production would be Unlawful Entry, a psychological thriller set to begin principal photography in late summer 1991 in Los Angeles, California. The film includes a scene in which Ray Liotta's character, a police officer, violently assaults an African American suspect. This scene was scripted before the Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police officers on March 3, 1991. Although the filming occurred before that incident, director Jonathan Kaplan mentioned that he attempted to "ignore it because the movie's not really about that." However, following the officers' acquittal on April 29, 1992, and the subsequent riots in Los Angeles, the perception regarding urban violence in films underwent a change. While the scene was considered crucial to the plot and could not be removed, Kaplan and producer Charles Gordon edited out most of the "lengthy" sequence. In May 1992, the film's release date was shifted from late 1992 to June 26, 1992.

Filming
Principal photography began on October 25, 1991. Filming took place in and around Los Angeles, California. The house that was used for the Carr residence in the film is located at 546 Wilcox Ave. The school sequence was filmed at Doris Place Elementary School. The sequence in which Michael is in jail was filmed at Lincoln Heights Jail. Production wrapped on February 5, 1992.

Soundtrack
The original soundtrack was composed by James Horner. It was released on Intrada Records, an extended version of the soundtrack was released by La-La Land Records in 2017.

The movie featured several songs that were not included on the soundtrack. "Pa La Ocha Tambo" and "Just a Little Dream" by Eddie Palmieri, "National Crime Awareness Week (Alfred Hitchcock Presents Mix)" by Sparks, Everybody's Free to Feel Good" by Rozalla, and "Don't Go to Strangers" by J. J. Cale.

All tracks written and composed by James Horner.
 * US CD (Intrada Records) track listing
 * 1) "Main Title" - 3:14
 * 2) "Intruder" - 2:08
 * 3) "Being Watched" - 5:42
 * 4) "Leon's Death" - 3:01
 * 5) "Drug Bust" - 3:06
 * 6) "Bail Denied" - 2:26
 * 7) "Pete's Passion" - 11:15
 * 8) "End Credits" - 4:22

Box office
The film was released in the U.S. on June 26, 1992, opening at #2 in 1,511 theaters, an average of $6,662 per theater. Grossing $10,067,609 in the opening weekend, it went on to gross $57,138,719 in the domestic market. It was a box-office success, and brought back its $23 million budget.

Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, 76% of reviews are positive from 37 critics, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The critical consensus reads, "Unlawful Entry may not depict a particularly novel or believable situation, but tense direction and a roundly committed cast make it easy to get caught up in the moment." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 61 out of 100, based on 25 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert praised director Jonathan Kaplan for giving the film's story a sense of realism with its locations, characters with "unrestrained realism" from the actors and having "undertones of a serious social drama" when confronting fears about a delusional police authority. Variety's Todd McCarthy wrote that despite being another film that follows in the mould of Fatal Attraction, he called it "a very effective victimization thriller", praising both Liotta and Russell's performances and Kaplan's direction of the script into "areas of social and class-structure observations" when dealing with unhinged police figures in an urban setting. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin was critical of the three main leads lacking depth and substance in the motivations of their characters but gave credit to Liotta for giving "complexity" to his role, a solid supporting cast and the "level-headed" direction Kaplan takes with the plot, even as it stretches credibility.