Before John McTiernan directed big time blockbusters like Die Hard and Predator he was the man behind 1986's Nomads, a film he both wrote and directed and that also served as an early film role or Pierce Brosnan. To date it's the only writing credit McTiernan has, and maybe that's for the best. Nomads is fun and it is entertaining, but when you think about it too much, well, the movie is a bit of a mess.

Flax (Leslie-Anne Down) is a doctor who is in charge of taking care of a man brought in who was living down by the beaches in Los Angeles. He seems to have something wrong upstairs and most suspect mental illness, or maybe drugs. Flax has got her work cut out for her: this guy rants at her in French and can and will get violent, but as he's under her care he whispers something in her ear and… then he dies. It turns out that this man was a French anthropologist named Jean Charles Pommier (Pierce Brosnan) and that it wasn't all that long ago that he moved to the City Of Angels with his wife (Anna-Maria Moneticelli) to live the American dream.

From here the movie bounces around and heads into some strange directions as Flax starts to experience Charles' past and learn what lead up to her taking care of him and ultimately his death. She learns that shortly after moving to L.A. he became the target of some leather clad punks (punks of the goofy eighties movie variety played by Adam Ant, Josie Cotton, and Mary Woronov!). Pommier investigates, he gets out there with his camera and tries to document things and figure out exactly who these people are and what they want. They trash his house and start stalking him and when Flax starts to see them herself, she realizes that they're the nomadic spirits of city dwelling Innuat that tie back to Charles' past!

There are some cool ideas here. The concept of Pommier transferring his memories to Flax before he dies, presumably so she can try to sort everything out where he's not able to, is an interesting one and it leads to some decent scenes where his wife is curious as to how this woman neither of them knew now seems to know things that she couldn't possibly know. There are some great shots here too, lots of nice lighting and some slick compositions and cool eighties era Los Angeles fashions on display. This keeps the movie fun to look at, and Brosnan fans will be interested to know that he's got a partial nude scene here too, so there's that. The idea of presenting the Innuat as eighties punks is an odd one but it sort of works, at least in a visual sense. The real problem is that we never get a sense of their purpose, they're just sort of their and they're never as scary as the characters seem to think that they are. The fact that they're played by who they're played by goes a long way towards making up for that, but a little more exposition would have gone a long way in that regard.

Performance wise, if Brosnan doesn't always completely nail the French accent his character sports he doesn't really embarrass himself either. He's fine in the role and it's interesting to see him cast against type here. There are moments where you have to question the logic of his character in the movie and spots where you kind of figure, huh, that dumb move of his kind of got him into this tricky spot to begin with, but that's less to do with his acting then the script. Leslie-Anne Down as the female lead is also fine but her work can't overcome similar problems to those Brosnan's character is stuck with: dumb moves on the part of Flax often land Flax in hot water.

The movie gets credit for trying something different. There's a surrealist element to the film and the way that it unfolds that is admirable, if not always well executed. Entertainment value is plentiful here, but the hard to miss logic gaps definitely hurt things a bit. It's a fun watch and an interesting movie not afraid to take some interesting chances, but it's definitely got a few problems too.

Video:

Nomads is presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition framed at 1.85.1 widescreen and generally it looks pretty good. Some scenes look like they were shot softer than others so detail isn't always super consistent but more often than not it is solid enough. Skin tones look fine and color reproduction is good. Black levels are pretty decent too and while shadow detail can vary a bit for the most part it's fine. The image is clean, showing no serious print damage just a few nicks and specks here and there. Compression artifacts aren't really a problem here and there are no obvious issues with any noise reduction or edge enhancement.