BEFORE: Getting really close to the end of the current Movie Year now, just 12 films to go after today. But there are 42 days left in the year, so I'm looking at about a month of down time, during which I'll feel like I'm making no progress. The holidays take some of the sting out of that, plus I'll have a lot of time to review my lists, search the streaming sites for films I haven't seen yet, update my cast lists, and start planning a chain for next February so that I can then reverse-engineer something for January. It's a process.
If I stick to my 300 films per year, once you factor in about 40 or 50 slots for romance, maybe another 30 or 40 for documentaries, and then 20 or 30 for horror films in October, that only leaves me about 180 to 210 "open" slots, ones that aren't bound by format. Call them the "freestyle" months if you want, but when I look at it that way, it's easy to see why films of the other genres seem to keep slipping through the cracks. Even after watching movies all year long, there's still a list about a mile-long of films that I just can't get to this year. Like "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" is off the table at this point, so is "Ghostbusters: Afterlife", and "Project Almanac" has been put on hold yet again. What about the recent movies like "Elvis", "Moonfall", "The Last Duel", and "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore"? Or "Nobody", "Licorice Pizza", "Nightmare Alley", and "The Green Knight"? "See How they Run", "Blood Father", "Dragged Across Concrete" and "Ambulance"? "Nope", "Blonde", "The Gray Man", "Bullet Train" and "The Protege". You see the problem, right? Hollywood keeps cranking movies out faster than I, or anyone, can possibly watch them. But it's a process.
Beau Bridges carries over from "The Good German". Anyway, soon the counter's going to reset and I can try to work in some of those films listed above. Just going to clear a few older films off the list and then think about the best way to move forward. That's a process too.
THE PLOT: A former getaway driver jeopardizes his Witness Protection Plan identity in order to help his girlfriend get to Los Angeles. The feds and his former gang chase them on the road.
AFTER: One last action movie before we start talking about the holidays. Damn, but this one was a lot of fun. What a difference a day makes, because I kept falling asleep during the last film, "The Good German", because there just wasn't enough happening to keep my attention. This one had me riveted, I wasn't even tempted to play games on my phone because there was always something going on - and I'm not even a car guy! If you ARE a car person, you'll probably like this one even more than I did. The star here is a 1967 Lincoln Continental, which the main character has modded with a 700 horsepower engine, and damn, that thing moves. This movie sort of makes me rethink my ban on the "Fast & Furious" movies, but I think I'll keep it in place, because at the end of the day, those films aren't comedies. Not intentional ones, anyway, and I think if I dived into that franchise I'd never stop making fun of it.
(Another character drives a Pontiac Solstice, or so I'm told, and the villain drives a BMW sports wagon, if you can believe that. And then late in the film, there's a Tatum, which is a really cool off-road racer, the kind that goes on those desert rally races, I think. Again, not a car guy, but now I kind of wish that I was.)
Yul lives in the middle of nowhere, under the assumed name Charles Bronson. Yep. But his girlfriend Annie teaches at a local college and her boss wants her to take a position at a better university in Los Angeles, which puts her in a difficult position. Take the dream job and move away from her boyfriend, or pass on the opportunity and then live with regrets. Yul can't leave the town he's hiding in, but then he decides he has to, to get her to the job interview in time by pulling his really fast car out of storage. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Annie's ex still hasn't gotten over her, and he's convinced Yul is a criminal, so he contacts the leader of Yul's old gang and blows his cover. Before long Yul and Annie are being chased by violent criminals and the Marshall that oversees him in the Witness Protection program, and also Annie's ex-boyfriend. An intimate knowledge of the California highway system may also be required here to really understand what's going on. This was filmed in towns like Tustin, Fillmore, Cornell and Santa Clarita in California, though Yul lives in Milton, which is 343 miles from L.A. That's a 5 or 6 hour drive, so I'm not sure why they have to leave the day before, especially with such a fast car. Maybe they're accounting for L.A. traffic, I don't know.
But I get it, California is really really big, yet somehow the people in these four cars still manage to keep finding each other, which maybe shouldn't be so easy. Yet the story demands it, so we have to accept it. But again tonight I'm reminded of the film "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", where four or five carloads of people are racing through California to get to a buried treasure. If you mixed that film with a Steve McQueen movie you might get something like "Hit and Run", or maybe not, this is kind of its own thing and shouldn't really be compared to other films. Maybe "Smokey and the Bandit" is a better comparison anyway.
Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell seem like a really together couple - hey, if you can live together and work together and make movies together and those movies are as fun as this one is, then more power to them. Maybe it's too late, but I would love to see a sequel to this film. Or a prequel - "Hit and Run 2" could go back and show us the story of those 13 bank heists, and Yul could be engaged to Neve and she could plan the heists with Alex and we could see what went wrong on that last one. Or it could detail what happened to Yul to initiate the change of conscience, what turned him around and put him on the path of self-awareness or redemption. What do you say, Hollywood?
Also starring Dax Shepard (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Kristen Bell (last seen in "You Again"), Tom Arnold (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Kristin Chenoweth (last heard in "The Witches"), Michael Rosenbaum (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), Bradley Cooper (last heard in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Jess Rowland (last seen in "CHIPS"), Ryan Hansen (ditto), Carly Hatter (ditto), John Duff (ditto), Joy Bryant (last seen in "Bobby"), David Koechner (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Steve Agee (last seen in "Brightburn"), Kal Bennett, Nate Tuck, with cameos from Jason Bateman (last seen in "Thunder Force"), Sean Hayes (last seen in "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown").
RATING: 7 out of 10 seniors at the lemon party
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