Like its hero, Next of Kin is an anomaly — a thriller about a family feud between hillbillies and wiseguys that brings together Patrick Swayze, Liam Neeson, Adam Baldwin, Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton and Ben Stiller.
Truman Gates (Swayze) is as elusive a cryptid as the Frozen Caveman Lawyer; born and raised in Appalachia, Truman emigrated to Chicago where he is now a plainclothes cop with a violinist wife (Hunt), a sports car, and a mullet that's pompadour on the front and a ponytail on the back; what we have here is a Civilized Redneck.
And yet Swayze makes the character work, precisely because he is the last person we would imagine as a hillbilly; thus, the otherness that Truman projects when he returns to Kentucky for the funeral of his younger brother Gerald (Paxton) feels genuine.
Elsewhere, Neeson is one of the few actors who could convincingly play a both a Highlander as well as a hillbilly; Paxton unfortunately only appears in a couple of scenes, and like Stiller has the thankless task of being a sacrificial lamb; as for Hunt, she is predictably reduced to a Damsel in Distress).
On the mob side, Baldwin is effective as main villain Joey Rossellini, playing him something like Full Metal Jacket’s Animal Mother back home from Vietnam. Being at least a head taller than the rest of the cast except Neeson, Baldwin looms menacingly over everybody else.
By contrast, Johnny Isabella (Andreas Katsulas) is one of those mob bosses who hasn't forgotten his humble origins and, accordingly, isn't too proud to roll up his sleeves and cook himself some traditional Italian dish — but with a nickname like Pappa John, what could you expect? (to be fair, Katsulas wasn’t copying Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas, which was released a year after Next of Kin.)
This is possibly the first of the now seemingly unending films where Neeson becomes a lone vigilante who decides to take the law into his own hands, in this case as Briar, Truman and Gerald's older brother not named after a former president.
Following Gerald's funeral, Truman and Briar return to Chicago separately; without the restrictions of the penal code, the latter’s investigation progresses more quickly than the former. Everything comes to a head in a graveyard shootout that includes throwing knives, bows and arrows, dogs and snakes, and which may or may not have inspired the climax Sam Rockwell envisions for the movie Colin Farrell is writing in Seven Psychopaths. All things considered, Next of Kin is like those oddball relatives we all have; as such, we can’t help love it even if we don't always like it.
