Bad Movie Habit: The Driver & Cannonball
I caught up with two movies that feature racings Trans Ams.
Ryan O’Neil channels Steve McQueen as The Driver. Good car chases. Good villian — Bruce Dern plays a great jerk. More overall excitement than Bullitt, but less of a story arc than The Transporter (if you can believe it). There are holes in the plot you could drive a Chevy small block through, probably why it succeeded as a video game. Worth seeing for genre fans. Also appropriate for fans of movies where the femme wears hats.
Cannonball is unwatchable, but noteworthy for a couple of reasons. Remember when competing studios issued movies with the same plot in the same year? It happened earlier than I thought. 1976 featured two movies about Edwin “Cannonball” Baker. This was the poorer of the two, but for all its crapiness it was still able to spawn three sequels. Stranger still it has cameos by Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese. Even though the film is supposed to be about a cross country race, I pretty sure they did all of the principle shooting on the same road in California. Boo.
image credit: videodetective.com
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