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Hal Ashby’s final project, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), marked the first time that one of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder mystery stories was made into a movie. Clear not long after this adaptation starts is that Ashby — best known for naturalistic, often warm-hearted movies about different pockets of American life — isn’t a very good choice to make a sordid neo-noir, and that this move from page to screen in general isn’t that interested in hewing very closely to its source material. 

8 Million Ways to Die is a reference to New York City, but the film for reasons that never strike you as that necessary has been transplanted to Los Angeles. It also tries to stuff the Scudder character’s arc, as it had unfolded across several books, into one movie. The movie always feels uncomfortable. Its attempts to be a labyrinthine mystery, a squalid noir, and a somewhat serious study of alcoholism’s destructiveness all have a similar quality to walking around in clothes that don’t fit. Yet I always found it engaging. It’s not so uncomfortable that it’s bad. It’s uncomfortable in a way that decently services already-discomfited material so lacquered in sleaze.

Jeff Bridges, so shaggily sexy and sun-kissed-looking that he automatically feels miscast as someone so down and out, plays Scudder in 8 Million Ways to Die. Within the first 10 minutes he’s lost everything: his job as a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy, his marriage, his relationship with his daughter, his health (his liver is nearing code-red levels of struggle) — to alcoholism so all-encompassing that he’d openly been taking swigs from a flask at work, which is another way saying right before an ambush that ends with him unnecessarily killing a man in front of his family. The movie picks up about six months after that series of unfortunate events has nuked his life. He’s been sober in that intervening time.

His barely-hanging-on stability is upended when he’s passed a cryptic note after an AA meeting. It leads him to an ultra-private gambling club in the Hollywood Hills, where he’s hired, on the down low, by a sex worker employed there, Sunny (Alexandra Paul), for protection and for help trying to get her out of a job she no longer wants to do. We marvel at the bad lines Paul is forced to say; there’s a loony one about her admiring the way her pubic hair glows in the street light when she stands close enough to a bedroom window. We also marvel at how soon she is dispatched. She’s kidnapped and killed right under Scudder’s nose so quickly that the blink and you’ll miss it cliché for once feels like not that big a stretch. The day after, Scudder wakes up in a drunken stupor, apparently having said some pretty incriminating things about his involvement in Sunny’s gruesome death.

In 8 Million Ways to Die, he’ll try to clear his name. He’ll also try to take down the drug lord, Maldonado (Andy Garcia), clandestinely running his operations under the nose of the gambling place’s comparatively ethical owner (Randy Brooks). No one in this movie feels particularly well cast — though Rosanna Arquette is OK as the tough-talking sex worker with whom Scudder will fall in love — but Garcia is so good as Maldonado that when he’s on screen you suddenly become glad the movie has been made. 

Garcia has a snaky smile curlicuing under his Spanish-accented niceties that let you know they’re actually threats. He makes a scene where he and Scudder are in terse conversation over, for some reason, sno cones more tense than silly. (Though it still strikes you as goofy to see Garcia, his hair pulled back into the world’s tiniest ponytail, be scary while also cooling off with some cherry on ice.) More goofy than tense is a trait that will again pop up during the film’s climax. But by then you’ve gotten so used to the movie’s lopsidedness that it works.