If you’re reading this in the future maybe every movie ever made is available for instant download, but in my day you had to be patient. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to see this thing. The closest I came before now was an old movie magazine I bought at an antique mall because it had Barbarella on the cover (wait a minute, is Roger Vadim the French Ted Turner?) So I bought it for the Barbarella, because a man has needs, but it turned out there was also an “article” – really just a plot summary – about THE SPLIT. I’d been meaning to read it and write a book-to-movie-summary comparison until they get off their ass and release it. But now thanks to French Ted Turner I don’t have to stoop to that.

Jim Brown plays McClane, a man of unspecified ill-repute who returns to his girl Ellie (Diahann Carroll) who’s pissed at him for leaving her and tries not to take him back. Meanwhile an old friend shows him an idea for a job- stealing all the gate and concessions money from a football stadium. He recruits a team and pulls off the job, but makes the mistake of leaving the whole score alone with Ellie before they can split it up. Next thing you know Ellie’s dead, the money’s gone, and everybody thinks McClane betrayed them. And he wants to get back his share.

For some reason I assumed this would be a weak one and not at all like the book. Actually it’s solid and although it’s alot different from the book it’s about as close as any of the other Parker movies. What surprised me most was the cast. His team is made up of a fighter (Ernest Borgnine), a driver (Jack Klugman), a safecracker (Warren Oates) and an assassin (Donald Sutherland). They also run into trouble with a pervert landlord (James Whitmore) and a police detective (Gene Hackman). Plus, the music is by Quincy Jones. So how the hell is this not on video?

One idea I really liked is how McClane picks his crew by testing them without their knowledge. My favorite scene is when he shows up in Borgnine’s office and just starts punching him. I never seen Borgnine look so tough, like an old school wrestling or boxing trainer. McClane takes some blows, gets a flying kick in, destroys some furniture. When he’s convinced this guy will do he just exits through the window, leaving Borgnine on the ground asking “What the hell was that about?”

The book The Seventh was the seventh Parker book, and the money was supposed to be split seven ways, so “the seventh” was what Parker was trying to get. If I remember right the heist was over much quicker in the book and the story was mostly about the aftermath. Also the way he lost the money made more sense because the girl he left it with was more familiar with his life and he just stepped out for a pack of cigarettes when it happened. In the movie he’s stupid and leaves it for a while with his uninvolved girlfriend. Like she’s gonna guard it.

For the most part though I think I understand why they felt they needed to Hollywood it up a little. It takes away some of what is unique about the Parker of the books, but it leaves a pretty solid heist movie that’s probaly a little more accessible. Parker in all the books (and none of the movies) is completely emotionless. He doesn’t even have a slight whiff of a soft side. Just a cold-blooded bastard concerned only with money. When his girl is killed he kind of figures well, shit happens. He only cares about getting his share back. But, you know, we expect that in Parker book #7. I can see why they’d worry that it would be too harsh in a standalone Jim Brown movie. He gets poor Diahann Carroll killed and doesn’t give a shit? No, they have to show that he wants vengeance (although to be fair the money does seem more important to him, since he knows he can get it back). Also unless I’m mixing it up with another one I think the book is one of the few where he loses at the end. But again, that’s in the context of a series, and you know he’ll get back on his feet in the next book. Might be more of a bummer in a movie.

A side note: I was telling some buddies about this movie and one of them heard me wrong, said “Jim Brown is in a parkour movie!?” And I thought damn, I would watch that. I don’t want poor Jim Brown to have to jump off buildings at his age, though. But how about a parkour Parker? The Luc Besson version of POINT BLANK. He could actually climb Alcatraz at the end. Think about it.

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Of course, the feel is pretty different from RAMBO. And there are three major differences in the type of story we’re dealing with here. Number one, it’s a team movie, it’s not focused on one dude. Number two, these are normal vets who have gone back to civilian life, they are not maniacs who have gone on a rampage and must get a pardon to go on the mission due to their skills with explosive tipped arrows. Number three, they are privately funded, they are not working for the government. In fact, the government is trying to stop them from doing it (you know how those fuckin bureaucrats are, with their red tape and what not. It makes you so mad BRING OUR BOYS HOME! etc.)

Not surprisingly, the movie is produced by John Milius (although if he worked on the script he was not credited). You probaly know who Milius is but if not here is a brief primer. He worked on an early unused script of DIRTY HARRY and later on MAGNUM FORCE. He wrote the famous USS Indianapolis speech in JAWS. He wrote APOCALYPSE NOW. He wrote and directed CONAN THE BARBARIAN. And RED DAWN. And John Goodman’s character in THE BIG LEBOWSKI is based on him. Except unlike that character he was not in Vietnam. He was never in the military, he’s just obsessed with it anyway. I wonder if he has flashbacks?

I’m pretty sure our politics are as opposite as oil and water, but I love the guy. He’s a great writer and there’s not alot of people who can write that macho. So his name was part of what got me to watch this movie.

And then there’s the cast. Gene Hackman plays Colonel Rhodes, a Korean War vet whose son was left behind in Vietnam. He spends years trying to get something done, meeting with politicians, hooking up with questionable people who sell him fake photos purporting to prove the location of POW camps or that his son is alive. Finally he gets this aerial photo that convinces him it’s where his son ended up. So he goes around and recruits the surviving members of his son’s platoon to go on a rescue mission funded by Robert Unsolved Mysteries Stack, the rich father of one of the MIAs.

On the team you got Fred Ward (MIAMI fuckin BLUES), Tim Thomerson (NEAR DARK and, uh… alot of crap, but he’s cool anyway), Randall “Tex” Cobb (the biker from RAISING ARIZONA, also villain in BLIND FURY), Reb Brown (muscle guy from various b-movies, played Captain America in TV movie), Harold Sylvester (sorry, I don’t know who he is but he was in a TV movie about firefighters which was also called UNCOMMON VALOR) and finally there’s pre-RED DAWN Patrick Swayze as a younger guy Rhodes brings in to help with the training.

Of course it’s just like an OCEAN’S 11 or any other type of recruiting-a-team movie, you see him meeting with the different guys in different situations. Reb Brown is the demolitions expert “Blaster,” but unfortunately he does not have a dwarf boss named “Master.” (He does have an assistant played by Michael Dudikoff, according to the credits, but I couldn’t figure out where he was in the movie.) We meet Blaster at a BMX track, wearing pants with his nickname running down the legs, telling war stories to little kids. Fred Ward is more troubled by the past and channels his trauma into weird metal sculptures. The mom from Malcolm in the Middle is his wife who yells at Rhodes for bringing up ‘Nam again. The best introduction is Thomerson, whose wife says he hasn’t taken his sunglasses off for six years, but as soon as Rhodes starts talking to him he takes them off. Finally somebody he can relate to.

The training takes up a good chunk of the movie. Robert Stack has even built them an exact replica of the POW camp to practice in, a luxury Rambo didn’t get with his taxpayer money. The way they show the team’s improvement is pretty ridiculous. Early on, Rhodes sneaks into their barracks and fires a machine gun, saying “You’re all dead.” But Fred Ward sneaks up behind him with a knife to show that at least he would’ve survived. At the end of the training section of the movie Rhodes comes into the barracks again but this time the entire platoon, fully suited, appears behind him smiling. So either these guys are ninjas or they have a Star Trek transporter deal under their beds.

Because Swayze is not a vet there’s some tension. The team, especially Tex, wants to fuckin kill him. He’s a little presumptuous to the point that Rhodes has to tell him not to talk to the soldiers the way he does, but he’s not really an asshole, and he’s dead set on being on this mission. I really like the scene where Tex and Swayze have finally had enough of each other and they’re gonna fight. You assume because he’s so big Tex will clobber him, but Swayze starts doing his ROADHOUSE kickboxing and knocks Tex over. But then there is another twist when Tex gets up and starts doing some of his own moves, re-turning the tables. He just beats the hell out of Swayze until Rhodes appears and tells them all the reason Swayze wants to be on the mission: his dad is an MIA. Without saying a word, Tex and the others carefully help him up and they all walk away, as if this has resolved everything.

I love it because in a normal story you would say wait a minute, why the hell didn’t he just say that in the first place to avoid all this trouble? But with these type of Milius characters it makes perfect sense. He wants to prove himself, he doesn’t want to have to say that his dad is an MIA. These guys are stubborn.

These are thin action movie character types, but they’re good ones. Tex is especially memorable as the big unruly soldier turned biker so crazy he wears a grenade on a necklace in case he ever needs to blow himself up. I will not say whether or not that ever comes up later. By the time they go on the mission you really like these guys, as broad as they are, and root for them to save the POWs. Hackman of course is especially good, which is important because he’s not just a soldier, he’s a dad looking for his son.

The actual battle is not as good as the action in FIRST BLOOD. It’s very ’80s, lots of explosions going off, which in one case does count as character development because Blaster is trying to make a new record for a string of detonations. But it could be more involving. They fly around on helicopters spraying everything with machine guns and alot of times you don’t see somebody get hit, you just notice them dead later. I think the main problem is the music by James Horner. The music should be intense and suspenseful, instead it’s trying to sound all triumphant and heroic, it completely takes the tension out of the situation. And he did the same shit 20 years later in John Woo’s god awful WINDTALKERS. Horner did a great job on ALIENS but believe me, if you’re doing a war movie talk to somebody else. This is not your guy.

The ending is bittersweet. I love the final freeze frame on Hackman, even though I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be as awkward as it is. His wife kisses him and I think this is to show there is some closure, he finally knows the fate of his son and he can move on with his life and their relationship will be better because he won’t be sneaking into other countries to meet with spies and arms dealers or going over the plans for a place to practice commando raids. She probaly figures since he won’t have to do that shit anymore maybe he’ll have time to cuddle and go for walks. That may be the idea but I also get the impression that he doesn’t even know how to kiss her anymore. It looks real uncomfortable like that scene where the lady hugs Robocop, or the one where Vin Diesel kisses a girl in XxX. So maybe he’s too far gone to be that normal husband she wants. Or maybe he’ll get his bearings back. It’s hard to tell.

A couple weird little things I noticed in the movie. First of all, there’s this scene about seven, seven and a half minutes in where Rhodes is meeting with some kind of senator or something, and the senator is walking with a guy who is a dead ringer for John Bolton, walrus mustache and everything. I thought maybe Bolton was a huge RED DAWN fan so Milius gave him a cameo, but then I realized RED DAWN was made later. So it must just be a popular look for those type of guys.

The other thing I noticed that is equally trivial but kind of weird is that in at least one of the training scenes every one of the soldiers is wearing Adidas. Don’t worry, they all have different styles, it’s not like a Heaven’s Gate cult type of thing. They have fatigues and everything but they’re not wearing boots. I didn’t know if that was product placement or if it meant Robert Stack was funding this mission with Adidas money.

Anyway, this is a pretty good movie and interesting historically to the evolution of the ’80s action genre. I give it three out of three Adidas stripes.

[ratings]

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The movie starts with a slaughterhouse montage showing cows going from cows to sausages. Like the e-coli version of the opening credits to WILLY WONKA. Along the way a dead dude gets thrown in there, chopped up, ground and turned into links, then a big sweaty dude says, “Special order,” packs ‘em up and mails ‘em to the guy’s boss.

That was the last guy that got sent into this place, so now it’s Lee Marvin’s turn. He takes a couple of boys and goes to threaten his old friend Gene Hackman, the head of Mary Ann’s Meats. That’s right, Gene Hackman plays a character named Mary Ann. He used to be part of the same Chicago crime scene as Lee Marvin, but he got sick of the competition and decided to start his own empire out in the booneys. This is where the movie starts to get weird, when you see it has a real fanciful idea of farmland criminal decadence. We first meet Mary Ann in a barn, laughing and eating a huge pile of ground meat, while his rich clients browse the hay-filled stalls where doped up naked girls lay around looking like corpses.

So Lee Marvin comes in, threatens Mary Ann, and leaves with one of the naked girls, future academy award winner/Carrie White Sissy Spacek. Turns out she grew up in an orphanage, actually raised for this fate as a white slave. Lee gets her a dress (but no bra) and brings her to a fancy restaraunt, where everybody stares at her visible nipples. She does some of the ol’ trademark Sissy Spacek wild girl routine, staring at everything with giant eyes like she was just born a full grown woman and is seeing earth for the first time. So of course it turns out that Lee is a tough guy criminal with a heart of gold. He never romances Sissy, but he takes good care of her and tries to help her save the other girls.

There are alot of weird moments in this movie, like when a guy tries to stab Lee with a sausage. But my favorite is sort of a NORTH BY NORTHWEST deal where Lee and Sissy are running through a wheat field and some young sweaty cowboy dude tries to run them down in some kind of wheat plow/hay bailer deal (I never worked on a wheat farm, sorry). There’s no way they’re gonna outrun the thing, but luckily Lee’s loyal chauffeur (the Alfred to his Batman) drives across the field right into the plow and shoots the driver.

So now the threat is over, the action scene has ended. And our heroes stand and watch as the plow chews the whole car into tiny pieces. It’s great.

The movie is well directed by Michael Ritchie, the dude that directed THE BAD NEWS BEARS. There’s lots of gritty atmosphere and quiet moments that erupt into some nice themes by Lalo Schifrin. But of course the show is all Lee Marvin’s. Not even Gene Hackman can take a movie from Lee Marvin.

Unfortunately, like POINT BLANK, this one’s not on DVD and out of print on VHS. And the transfer’s pretty fucked, always either obviously cropped or weirdly stretched out to fit the shape of a TV. Still, it’s well worth tracking down and I’m sure some day the nitwits will figure out to put it on a more convenient and round type of format.

UPDATE: the nitwits did release it on dvd, check it out

[ratings]

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Now this is a suspense thriller and the way it unfolds, it almost reminds me of a less flashy Brian DePalma. It even has the old DePalma voyeurism. But what I’m talking about is it takes its time setting up all the pieces and giving you the information you need a chunk at a time.

See, first Clint is in a museum sketching a painting. Right off the bat we know something is wrong because aren’t you supposed to make up your own picture, not copy somebody else’s painting? What the shit. Still, this is a clear indication that Clint agrees with me on my Theory of Badass Juxtaposition, giving his character a love of art.

Then we see Clint’s house, where he has a lot of art hanging on the walls. But some pretty fucking fancy art. Old stuff. Hmmm.

Then he drives out to a rich guy’s house and breaks in. This is when we learn that he is a burglar. Because of the fact that he is currently burgling.

Clint is not in a hurry at all, he seems to know for sure these people aren’t coming home any time soon. He’s wrong though, so he ends up hiding behind a two way mirror in the jewelry vault, watching as the lady of the house carries on a drunken affair with Gene Hackman, that asshole from the movies. This takes a while but eventually things get out of hand, Hackman slaps the girl, she slaps him back, he starts to strangle her, she stabs him in the arm with a letter opener, suddenly he yells “Help!” and a bullet goes through the girl and two armed guards run in.

(oh shit.)

Then Judy Davis comes in and as Clint sits there wondering what kind of shit he’s in, they all try to figure out what to do about this dead body. Gene Hackman is obviously an important pillar of the community type person judging by this support team, but right now he’s a pathetic drunk curled up on the bed whimpering. Only later do we see him introduced as “Mr. President” and realize, oh shit, that drunk’s the president. (I figure Clint must’ve known this while he was watching the murder, but he didn’t say anything because he was hiding.)

The presidential team cleans up the scene and make up a cover story involving a burglar, then as they’re on the way out they realize they forgot the letter opener (with Hackman’s blood and fingerprints on it). Going back in, they spot Clint rappelling out the window and realize that there really WAS a burglar. Good guy to pin this all on, since he’s the only one who knows the truth, etc.

It turns out the dead woman is the wife of the president’s best friend, a famous philanthropist who also funded the president’s political career. This is not usually how donors are treated in real politics but hey man, that’s the magic of cinema.

Clint is a great thief but he’s also an old man, and he’s never gone up against some fucking president guy before. He figures he’s out of his league, so he makes preparations to leave the country. But in the airport bar he happens to see a press conference where President Hackman puts his arm around the dead woman’s husband and pretends to be comforting him. And this pisses Clint off.

I mean look, every one of us has experienced this sort of thing at least 250,000-300,000 times since the year 2000 alone. You see the president saying some unbelievable bullshit on TV and you can’t believe that he somehow was able to top the one he said yesterday, and you feel like either your forehead is gonna pop a vein or you’re gonna reach right into the set like a reverse Nightmare On Elm Street 3 maneuver so you can throttle the motherfucker. It’s a familiar scenario to us, right? And all we do is we end up yelling at the TV or turning it off. But that’s us. We can’t do anything. This is different. This is Clint.

So it’s at exactly this moment that the movie steps over the line from suspense thriller to the territory of Badass Cinema. ‘Cause Clint burns a hole through the TV with his squinty eyes and says, “You heartless whore – I’m not running from you.”

Next scene, he’s on the White House tour wearing a fake beard. I’m sorry, United States Government, I regret to inform you that you chose the wrong motherfucker to fuck with.

Because this is Clint’s movie, there is also a whole subplot about his strained relationship with his daughter, played by Laura Linney. She’s still angry because he wasn’t there for her, always off stealing or in the can or something. But then she discovers that he actually was there, sneaking around in the shadows of her life, looking out for her, even checking her refrigerator to be sure she’s getting enough nutrients. This is one of many forgivably phoney elements of the story. It’s also hard to buy that the president doesn’t have a bigger security team, and alot of the press coverage seems fake, and when he gets what’s coming to him it’s kind of hard to believe it could really happen that way. But oh well.

I gotta say, I almost prefer this type of Clint Eastwood movie to the Serious ones. By which I just mean I like it better than Mystic River. What they do, they set up this clever old man disguise wearing thief, and the bad situation he gets in when he just happens to see the president have rough sex and then have his lady friend killed. Then they set up the secret service guy who wants to silence him (Dennis Haysbert, from the tv commercials), and the other secret service guy (some other actor) whose intentions are ambiguous, and the old man who thinks Clint killed his wife, and the assassin hired to kill Clint, and the cops (including Ed Harris, Knightriders) who are trying to catch him because they think he did it. And then you watch all these different factions line up and collide and you feel all suspensed and it’s an explosive whiteknuckle thrill ride or whatever.

Well I guess that’s how suspense movies always work so I’m not telling you anything new here. But when Clint does it it’s something special.

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