My review was written in May 1987 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.
Television star Ed Marinaro makes an unsuccessful transition to a leading role in a feature film via "Mace", an impoverished police thriller. Stillborn pic doesn't even play as exploitation fodder, despite its down and dirty theme.
Marinaro is an Atlanta cop nicknamed Mace, because he sprayed mace down a suspect's throat a while back, causing him to be demoted from homicide lieutenant to the vice squad. He's assigned to a case with partner Darrell Larson, involving the suspicious drug overdose deaths of a series of topless dancers (pic is so wimpy they rarely are topless despite endless strip sequences as filler).
Convoluted plot line (delivered mainly in gobs of verbal exposition) has the strippers connected somehow with security leaks, KGB agents, Bulgarian diplomats (pic's original title was "The Sofia Conspiracy") and blackmail. The FBI finally steps in and Mace is bounced off the case. He loses his badge when he continues any=way in order to help protect a stripper he has fallen for (Cassandra Gava a/k/a Gaviola) and protracted windup is a sick variant on Dirty Harry behavior.
This nonsense might have been diverting with an adequate budget, to deliver the globe-hopping thriller narrative replete with dateline/city i.d. Superimpositions. Instead, painfully underlit cheapie takes place entirely in Atlanta, with the cast endlessly discussing the international implications.
Marinaro is grumpy and unappealing, not an antihero, but a non-starter here. Rest of the principals are merely adequate and the strippers are not sexy enough by a country mile. Tech credits are weak.
