Two-Minute Warning dvd movie.|
Two-Minute Warning buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $9.99 Our Price: $9.99 Features • Closed-captioned • Color • DVD-Video • Letterboxed • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 12 November, 1976 DVD Release : 15 December, 1998 |
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Two-Minute Warning description Unfairly dismissed by a number of critics, Two Minute Warning is an absorbing contemplation of the phenomenon of violence. Based on a novel by George LaFountaine, the story concerns an anonymous (and, until the very end, faceless) sniper perched above the scoreboard at a championship football game in Los Angeles. His lack of identity and unstated motivation is key to the film's air of cautionary fable, in which the killer's rage is one end of a continuum that includes many different kinds of violence among numerous characters: emotional withdrawal, police brutality, subtle racism, chips on various shoulders. Produced in 1976, the movie has all the hallmarks of the decade's vogue for disaster flicks: an ensemble cast, a web of story lines, and a lot of people contained in one place where something awful happens. But it is also something more: a successful exercise in plastic storytelling, a clever interweaving of a dozen discrete subplots with a mix of documentary and original action footage. The explosiveness of the football game itself becomes a refrain of ritualized mayhem in director Larry Peerce's patchwork film, but without beating us over the head with its metaphorical obviousness. Two Minute Warning may not be a great or classic work, but it is far more than the sum of its many parts and does leave a lasting impression. --Tom Keogh |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Not as good as Black Sunday... |
| Although "Two-Minute Warning" is still an entertaining movie about a "situation" developing, when a madman prepares to shoot people in a stadium, the movie has some holes in it.
I won't spend too many words about its transfer on DVD, which is standard, but could have been taken better care of. The holes I mentioned before, are mainly referred to the characters involved in this movie. Except for some very general hints on who they all are, there is practically no "in-depth" character study whatsoever. All the characters could have been taken form the street and assembled together at random. We know nothing about them, except for the rather obvious. The movie at one point, even goes so far, as to almost become a training documentary, or even a promotional spot for the S.W.A.T. We never get to truly understand who the heck the "madman" is or wants, or for this matter, what triggered him to such an action. There is no way to either truly sympathize for his own personal ordeal that pushes him to such folly, nor to really hate him for it. All we get of him, are very general shots form afar, or seen "through his eyes", but we can't even "hear" his thoughts that might go through his mind at that moment. While in "Dirty Harry", Andrew Robinson, as the Scorpio Killer, made us love to hate him, for all the obvious reasons, and also because we get to "know" him, in this picture, there seems to be no need to get to know the guy and therefore, we cannot decide what to think about it all. As with the characters played by Charlton Heston and John Cassavetes, two otherwise very talented actors, we absolutely have no true idea from what kind of a background they stem from, and therefore they are just standing there, wooden, watching and studying. Also, even though we know that the shooter will at one point or another, take aim and shoot some people, the entire process that leads to the final moment in which it happens, is so dragged by the feet, that when it happens, no one is truly surprised nor really concerned with it anymore. The poor Jack Klugman (the famous Oscar Madison of TVs "The Odd Couple" and "Quincy"), in one of his last roles, is totally wasted here, delivering very shallow lines and almost reprising a role, similar to the one he played in "The Odd Couple", only a bit more dramatic. Even Martin Balsam ("The Anderson Tapes", "The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three" and "Murder on the Orient Express"), Brock Peters, Gena Rowlands (watch her in "Gloria"), David Janssen, Walter Pidgeon and Beau Bridges don't manage to save the day in this picture. This is not a movie I can truly recommend, except maybe, just to compare it in scope to "Black Sunday", which is by far more entertaining and original in its development. These two pictures watched back-to-back, would make for an interesting case study on how to produce, and not to produce a good movie. |
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