The Gauntlet (1977)

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, Bill McKinney, William Prince, Michael Cavanaugh. [R]

It’s Eastwood vs. the American Southwest when his hard-living Phoenix cop is sent to Vegas to escort a pugnacious witness (Locke) who has the goods on the sort of corrupt, powerful honchos that have the resources to make sure she never gets to testify—how long can these two survive with every cop, crook, biker, and hitman in the area trying to gun them down in transit? Dumb and far-fetched actioner, one of the star’s weakest in the genre, is not bereft of skill and style, but to what purpose besides generating a lot of noise and mayhem? Tens of thousands of bullets (blanks) are fired, more than enough to make the whole thing incessant instead of exciting (at one point, a house is blasted at such length that it finally collapses into rubble); by the time the titular “gauntlet” is run in an armored bus down a long city street, it’s hard to care about anything other the state of one’s hearing. Tension and excitement are tough to find when the opponents are so lacking in menace and competence; besides, in Eastwood’s actorly playbook, exuding “panic” was never one of his specialties, resulting in a hero who looks more inconvenienced than desperate. Locke, meanwhile, gets the two-sided coin treatment by being tough and crafty one moment, and a damsel needing to be saved the next (including from an attempted gang rape in one rather tasteless scene). At least the filmmakers got in that prominent product placement for Tab cola.

38/100