There's got to be some place in film history for this terrible film. Considering the cast, Hollywood in-jokes and driving stunts from the legendary stuntman tuned mediocre director Hal Neeham the film is some kind of milestone.
Burt Reynolds is the star of the film and Cannonball Run is really the end of his run as a major Hollywood star. Too many bad films finally did him in. Dino and Sammy show up dressed as a couple of boozing priests. With the participation of these former members of The Rat Pack Cannonball Run is thematically linked to films like Ocean's 11 and Robin and the Seven Hoods. These films are big Hollywood in jokes making money by ripping off the public pretending to be entertainment.
Since the film was produced by Golden Harvest the production company Jackie Chan was associated with. The Chinese actor Chan is cast as a Japanese driver. You get to see Chan speak in his original voice and beat up Peter Fonda reprising his original biker role of "Blues" from The Wild Angels.
Farrah Fawcett is the eye candy in this film, she has absolutely no chemistry with any of the cast especially Reynolds. Fawcett lasted one season on Charlie's Angels and tried her damnedest to make a career for herself as a serious actress with mixed results. She looks and acts in the film like she would really like to be someplace else.
The film also has one of the most bizarre supporting casts in the movies. Mel Tillis doing his weird stuttering character, Jack Elam hamming it up mercilessly, Jimmy the Greek Snyder, Adrienne Barbeau and her breasts, Roger Moore in the Aston Martin, dumbbell ex football jock and NFL commentator Terry Bradshaw, game show host Bert Convey, Warren Berlinger star of many mediocre Disney films and George Furth who was frequently associated with Steven Sondheim
That's the way it goes in this film.
20th Century Fox forced theaters to take this film and it had a mass release in the summer of 81. It made money but clearly everyone associated with it knew it was pretty bad.
The director Hal Needham was a buddy of Burt Reynolds. Needham had been a stuntman and stunt coordinator for years, he knew how to stage car crashes and stunts but his direction was so pedestrian, the dangerous driving looks pretty unexciting throughout the film.
95 minutes.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment