Metacritic reviews

Striking Distance opens and closes with a pair of jolting high-speed chases, the first over Pittsburgh streets, the second over the rivers that encircle the city’s center. In between is a lively mystery thriller that hurtles past plot contrivances and unintended laughs to deliver the goods as a satisfying escapist diversion. Like a paperback purchased at an airport just before you board a plane, it serves well its time-killing purpose but isn’t designed to stand up under close scrutiny.

If Striking Distance were a book, it could be called a good read. Instead, it's a painless watch.

Willis and Parker are fine in their respective roles, but neither character is given much spark. Willis sulks for most of the picture, grimacing at his enemies and drinking his way through scenes.

The plot of STRIKING DISTANCE is full of implausibilities, but they're entirely beside the point, since the film delivers what it promises: tough talk, chase scenes by land and by water, plenty of explosions, and pretty girls murdered in nasty and imaginative ways, served up with a dash of sex and a generous helping of knee-jerk cynicism.

Herrington stages his action efficiently enough - the opening car chase manages to put a couple of spins on a hackneyed cinema staple - but is let down by his own script which seems to have been hanging around in the water so long it's become bloated.

Columbia apparently dragged the river to come up with the script for this Bruce Willis vehicle -- an OK action movie until it sinks under the weight of implausible plotting and over-the-top direction.

His unauthorised investigation, with partner Jo Christman (Parker), is a routine affair, the film's familial and professional tensions sunk by a script that's all development and no pay-off.

Striking Distance is an exhausted reassembly of bits and pieces from all the other movies that are more or less exactly like this one.

Bruce Willis is at his most morose in this flat, dankly lit, grindingly inept thriller about a serial killer whose victims all turn out to have been acquaintances of Willis’ rumpled, alcoholic cop hero. As his by-the-book partner, Sarah Jessica Parker is the only one in the movie who doesn’t look sleep-deprived.

This is pop pornography, sex and violence without meaning. If you can't figure out the way Striking Distance is going in the first few minutes, it just means you've already fallen asleep.