In 1981, I saw this movie and liked it. Yesterday, I watched it on YouTube.
Frank Hart (Lee Majors) had been a race car driver before the pandemic struck. Much of the population was wiped out and what was left congregated mostly in the cities. Soon, cars were confiscated, planes were no longer in use, purportedly to preserve what little fuel was left. That was twenty years ago, putting the 'present' somewhere between 2000 and 2010. Now Frank is a spokesman for the mass transit system, an unhappy cog in what has become a police state. The only sign of hope is the occasional transmission from Radio Free California.
Speaking of a police state, Ms. Santana is getting a report on how Hart was 3 minutes later than usual to work and there was footage of him prowling around a confiscation yard (where the confiscated cars are) for the third time in the last month. He is called in and told he will have a hearing that may result in jail. His response is to curse out Ms. Santana. That night, he goes to his garage and starts excavating. Hidden away is his prototype race car.
Meanwhile, Ring (Chris Makepeace) is a brilliant, anti-social prep school student who has been hacking into government servers and vandalizing campus statues with homemade explosives. It just so happens that Frank gives a fiery anti-government speech at that very prep school. With the police on his trail, Ring opts to flee to Frank's house. The pair make an escape from Boston in Frank's car. The golf cart police vehicles don't stand a chance. It is California or bust.
Once out of the city, the fugitives appear to be mostly home free. There are people who roam the mostly unpopulated land but there are otherwise few obstacles. Thus Captain J. G. Williams (Burgess Meredith) is recalled from retirement. An ace pilot from both Korea and Vietnam, he is enlisted in restoring an old jet and then hunting down the race car. The jet is an F-86 Sabre, a fighter that was mostly retired by the Vietnam War. Why this jet? And weren't there any younger pilots? Had pilots suffered a higher casualty rate in the pandemic? The movie does not answer these questions.
Frank and Ring have reached Kansas before Captain Williams shows up. After one strafing run, the car goes into hiding with an Indian tribe who have reclaimed the land since the pandemic. Frank meets and falls in love with Eudora; this may be a place to end his run. Ring wants to keep going. The government is determined that the car must be destroyed and Frank must be made an example. Troops descend on the Indian town and start shooting civilians. And the chase is on again.
There is a lot of promise in this movie but little of it is realized. Lee Majors was the wrong man for the part and doesn't have the acting talent to pull off the character. The script does him no favors either. The growing father-son relationship with Ring is poorly executed as is his flash love affair with Eudora.
Burgess Meredith is likewise not the best choice. He comes across as being on the edge of senility. Moreover, this is a man who remembers the days of freedom and clearly misses his flying days. It would be hard to pick someone more unsuited to assassinating an unarmed race car driver. However, it is quite clear that Meredith had a great deal of fun playing the role.
The setting is interesting but not sufficiently explained. Is this police state government really so toothless that it must get a septuagenarian crackpot pilot to stop Frank? The world must have fallen much farther than it appears. Are we in a Dark Age with a few pockets of humanity? No, that doesn't quite work. Somehow, the controller in Boston is able to locate exactly where the car is and how fast it is going. Ditto for the F-86. Here is a totalitarian government that knows all but has very little ability to influence anything beyond the cities.
At times, the movie does feel like a defense of automobiles. The car itself is central and the Washington fixer is concerned that people will want to drive cars again. Even today's government is ever so keen on mass transit (witness the
train boondoggle in California) and down on privately owned cars. But even here, the movie only hints at being a pro-car movie.
The car itself, so integral to the story, is ludicrous. Who makes a race car with two seats? The car is NASCAR meets Formula 1. The design needs to have a second seat so Ring can come along. I don't follow racing and am far from a car guy and yet I see the car as impractical and silly. If it was something he had built over the last two decades, maybe. Nope, this is something he buried to prevent it from being confiscated.
