I gotta be honest. As good as THE WARRIORS is it’s not quite the amazing masterpiece I like to remember it as. What makes it good is mostly on the surface: the different gangs and their gimmicks, the bleak rawness of everything from the cinematography to the John Carpenter-ish analog keyboard music, and the dead seriousness of all the characters in the face of this exaggerated world where thugs patrol the streets in baseball uniforms and gangs seem to outnumber law abiding citizens by a thousand to one.

This is all more than enough to make it some kind of minor classic, but my memory was being pretty charitable to the storytelling. I always loved the mythological simplicity of it: Cyrus calls a meeting to try to unite all the gangs, some prick assassinates Cyrus and blames The Warriors, now these 9 guys have to cross New York on foot to get back home before the other gangs kill them. It’s a good old fashioned odyssey or a guantlet or whatever.

But watching it this time I don’t think Walter Hill keeps the momentum of that journey from point A to point B. Or the simplicity. He splits up the group. They don’t even realize at first that everyone’s after them. And half of them keeping getting distracted by the eternal search for pussy. This is pretty funny when they try to hook up with the girl gang called the Lizzies and they don’t seem to notice the obvious fact that the Lizzies are not, you know, into guys. If only that homophobic prick Ajax was there, he calls everybody “faggot” all the time so maybe he would’ve picked up on it. Anyway, there’s some meandering, it doesn’t really build like it could, when they get to the beach on Coney Island to face off with their enemies maybe you should feel more like they’ve been through Hell and back.

But I’m kind of nitpicking. I like the whole tone of this movie. Everybody looks so serious all the time. Warriors rarely smile. They’re macho like Spartans, they have a code they stick to stubbornly. Like the scene where they have to go through Orphan turf but there’s a whole political negotiation first. And it’s decided that all they have to do is take off their vests, they can’t go through in uniform. But they refuse. They’d rather fight and maybe die than take off their colors. It’s not clear if they’d be allowed to just turn them inside out like they made kids do with their Spuds Mackenzie shirts in the ’80s. And if it had been the Baseball Furies or the mime gang would they have had to clean off their face paint? (more…)

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