I haven't watched this since I was 15 years old in 1990 and I liked it then and 30 odd years later it's still a good watch. Much better than action/thrillers being made these days.

Warren Stantin (Sidney Poitier) is an FBI agent in San Francisco. A hostage situation goes wrong. The killer escapes with a bag of diamonds. Stantin follows a similar killing to the wilderness of Washington. He suspects the killer had surreptitiously joined a fishing expedition guided by Sarah Rennell (Kirstie Alley). Her partner Jonathan Knox (Tom Berenger) sets out to follow and is forced to take the city slicker G-man with him.

It's Sidney Poitier's first movie in over a decade. He hasn't lost a step. He is surprisingly funny at times. The fish out of water aspect is solid and fun. His most memorable scene is probably scaring away the bear. The killer is kept a mystery in a good way. That half is a fun little mystery. I would have preferred ending the movie in the woods. There are a couple of good ideas in the city. The car chase is nothing special but solidly 80's action. There is a good switch-a-roo that ties in with an earlier moment. I don't know about keeping Kristie Alley a hostage all through that part of the movie. It makes much more sense for the killer to kill any possible witnesses once he escaped to the city. Kristie becomes a hinderance during the escape. That's all the more reason to end the movie in the woods. The killer is incentivized to keep his hostage alive as long as he needs a guide. Overall, this is a solid 80's action thriller.

After an eleven year absence from the screen, Sidney Poitier chose to return in an action/adventure film where he plays an FBI agent in search of a killer.

He's got good reason to want this guy bad. His quarry is ruthless and kills without mercy. Poitier loses a hostage and the ransom he's asked for. But some good detective work has traced the man to a remote part of the Pacific Northwest.

Where the perpetrator has killed again and joined a party of dry fly fishermen being guided by Kirstie Alley into the rugged mountains. No place for a city kid like Poitier, says mountaineer/hermit Tom Berenger who has the prerequisite skills to get the job done. These two are forced into an alliance of inconvenience.

The best thing I liked about Shoot To Kill is the guessing game we play for the identity of the perpetrator. Any one of the five men in Kirstie Alley's party could have been the killer. Look at the cast list and you'll recognize a few names who've played some pretty loathsome villains in the past. The identity is revealed suddenly and quite shockingly.

What I didn't like with Shoot To Kill is the fact that the final confrontation with the perpetrator is in big city Vancouver where he's escaped with Alley. He needed her in the woods, not any longer, she should have wound up dead. And Berenger and Poitier should have confronted him in the woods.

That script decision made the climax a rather ordinary one that you see in a whole lot of police chase films. Still all the players do fine here, my favorite being Kirstie Alley as the woods smart guide.