I've been sick in the last couple of days, so I didn't wander around in search of plants, insects, and sceneries to photograph, but watched tons of movies instead. I still feel too tired for my usual activities, but I'm also cured enough to make a post about an interesting, obscure action/adventure gem I saw yesterday.
I stumble across obscure movies surprisingly often while watching things on YouTube or exploring random stuff on the Internet. Just come across trailers, or entire movies, mostly old ones. But in this case, things happened differently. I heard about it, and I saw an excerpt while watching one of the 1981 episodes of the Siskel & Ebert Show on YouTube. I discovered that movie review show, only this year, and I enjoy it very much, although I disagree with one or both of the protagonists quite often.
Good, memorable adventure movies with the right amount of wit, action, and an overall sense of adventure, have always been rare, so I decided to see if I agree with the mythic movie critic duo in the case of High Risk. Siskel & Ebert both agreed that the movie is a very unexpected, and unexpectedly pleasant surprise.
The first surprise for me was the title that appeared on my PC screen soon after I started the movie. I stopped the movie and went on a Google search to see which title is more present on the Internet. The movie is very obscure and mostly forgotten so I found only 10 pages that are about it when I searched for " High Risk, 1981." When I typed "Satisfaction, 1981" I found nothing even remotely related to this movie. Then I tried "Satisfaction, 1981, James Brolin" and I found a couple of pages about High Risk. All the pages were in German.
And here, is time to say that James Brolin is the actor that portrays one of the four very distinct and memorable protagonists. Stone is the name of the character and he is kind of a leader of the clumsy, unprepared robbers with no previous experience in any kind of criminal activity.
Dan, portrayed perfectly by Bruce Davison, is shy, gentle, always worried, less action-oriented, and the most reasonable of the four.
Rockney, played by Cleavon Little, is cool, cheerful, and a joy to watch in action moments of the movie.
All the protagonists are ordinary dudes with ordinary, unspecified jobs that will never resolve their ordinary financial struggles, but Tony played by Chick Vennera is arguably the most ordinary of them. It stands out for that and is cool and funny in its own, special way. Like all of them.
The first images of the movie, before the title, show a city at dawn. Stone is driving and the voice from his car radio is talking about the weather, temperature, and news about unemployment, inflation, and factories that will probably close soon. That early morning radio talk is the first hint of the motives that will turn our protagonists into criminals and adventurers.
Stone picks them one by one. They exit their homes with fishing equipment, we see them say bye-bye to wives, girlfriends, kids, and stuff like that. It all happens in two minutes in the movie. It's nice and effective, and all the little bye-bye moments look spontaneous and authentic. For me, that was the first hint that I will like the movie.
Soon we learn that the weekend fishing getaway is a cover and that they are up to something more dangerous. They meet with a shady character called Clint, played by Ernest Borgnine, and he sells them some arms. Pistols and rifles. That takes only another four or five minutes of the movie. But each of those minutes tells a lot about the characters, and each interaction is memorable. They are getting ready to fly to Columbia and rob a corrupt millionaire that is also a drug lord. Don't worry, I won't bore you with every little detail of the plot, from now on. This was just to emphasize how nicely written the thing is, and how the pace of the movie is fast, effective, and very entertaining. And unpredictable too.
Basically, the heist doesn't go easy as expected, which doesn't sound like something unpredictable for this type of movie, but the way things unravel after they take the money and run provides plenty of charming entertainment and quite a few surprises too.
The main villain, the drug lord played by James Coburn is well-mannered and calmly menacing.
In this screenshot, you can see Dan (Bruce Davison) gently, and clumsily tying him to a chair while the drug lord observes the epic amateurishness of the heist.
Anthony Quinn is an old general that ends up involved in the adventure at one point. He is the leader of a ragtag revolutionary group that doesn't care much about changing society. They are only surviving by being bandits.
Like all characters in the movie, he is also very memorable.
At one point, while temporarily locked behind bars in some remote small town, our male protagonists meet Olivia, the only female protagonist of the movie and she also becomes part of the adventure. Olivia is played by Lindsay Wagner. Lindsay Wagner was The Bionic Woman in the famous TV show of the same name in the seventies.
High Risk was written and directed by Stewart Raffill. It was filmed in locations in Mexico and those locations look great in the movie. The scenery is always interesting. The action is dynamic and funny, with quite a few cool lines thrown at the right moment. Just like in the Indiana Jones movies. Or Romancing the Stone which even shares the Colombian setting with this movie. Raiders of the Lost Ark came out the same year. Romancing the Stone in 1984. Both are remembered as big, iconic hits of the eighties. I think that High Risk deserves a bit of that popularity too.
Indiana Jones always has fantastic elements and everything revolves around some weird archeological mystery. In Romancing the Stone, a female romance novelist is at the center of the adventure. High Risk starts as a heist movie and then turns into an adventure. It merges the two genres in a very cool and seamless way.
On the Wikipedia page of the movie, I found out that the director said he got the idea to make the film when hired to make a documentary where he had to interview people in Spanish prisons who were imprisoned for smuggling hashish out of Morocco. Later he found out that the people who financed him were preparing to get into the drug trafficking business and wanted to find out how to smuggle hashish out of North Africa.
Stone, the character played by James Brolin, it's a filmmaker who found the target for the heist while making a documentary in Columbia, some time before the events shown in the movie.
One of the reasons why the movie wasn't a box-office success is the fact that it wasn't widely seen. When the film was released, the distributor went broke, according to the Wikipedia page.
I could quote quite a few memorable lines and situations from this movie that deserve to enter the anthology of the best, coolest, and funniest action movie moments from the eighties, but I won't. That could be a bigger spoiler than revealing the details of the plot.
And that's it. My first movie review on HIVE is almost finished. I'll push the publish button soon.
Once processed through my sophisticated rating system, made of "I highly recommend", "I highly recommend ... but ..."," I recommend", "I don't care, but you may like it", "Do whatever you please", "Don't tell me this shit is good", " Barely watchable", and "What a piece of crap", High Risk gets a solid "I highly recommend ... but only if you are into action/adventure stuff from the eighties." Otherwise, "Do whatever you please."
The images in the post are screenshots I took while watching the movie for the second time, early this morning.
