Retro Review: Two-Minute Warning

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I'm a huge fan of most things 1970s, and I recently heard of this movie via a post on Reddit. It's about a sniper who has his sights set on the crowd at a football championship game (they're careful to never refer to it as a Super Bowl). It's sort of in the vein of those 1970s disaster films, except it's not really about a disaster. But it has that same vibe.

While I liked the film, here's the problem with it: editing. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. I have no problem with character building. I have no problem with a movie taking it's time to establish a plot, or characters, or whatever. But by the time this film actually got along with the plot, I paused it to see how much time had passed, and it was halfway through the film. In fact, at the time of this writing, if you look the film up on Wikipedia, the summary of the film written there starts at the midway point of the film.

The opening credits sequence was an early red flag. A long....long....looooong flyover shot of the stadium. It set my Spidey-senses off early. After a quick introduction, of sorts, to the shooter, as he murders a man on a bicycle, we're introduced to our cast of characters. Nothing wrong with that. It just includes...a lot of information. A lot of information which could have been edited out. The worst offender is the Beau Bridges character and his family, who, despite how much screen time they get, their names I still can't recall. We get to witness the following:

  • The family's drive to the game, and Beau complaining to his wife that the kids shouldn't have mints, because they'll end up needing a dentist.
  • Beau's wife complaining about the cost of parking.
  • The family having a picnic lunch.
  • The family buying souvenir hats.

Once the film finally gets moving -- once you've sat through arguments between David Janssen and his girlfriend, witnessed awkward flirting between a doctor and a girl who's there with her roommate's boyfriend (the roommate got sick and the girl came along so the boyfriend would have someone to watch the game with), Jack Klugman badgering a priest for prayers during the game, and....more of Beau and his family -- it really gets exciting. Jarringly so. It escalates quickly. You've just sat through an hour plus of ho-hum character exposition, when the violence ramps up graphically. So much so, that when they released the film to television, they filmed additional footage and added a whole new subplot so they could replace some of the violence (I haven't watched this version yet, but I think it says something that I liked half this movie enough to get my hands on the TV version today, and hope to watch it soon).

Oh, and how could I not mention that Charlton Heston stars in it?

I have such conflicting feelings about this film. I'd love to edit it down to improve the pacing. I once made my own cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture where I removed all of the extraneous (read: boring) special effects footing/shots of the crew staring in awe at the view screen, and reduced the runtime to about 90 minutes. And improved the pacing. This movie would've benefited from some editing.


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