MovieChat Forums > Two-Minute Warning (1976) Discussion > 2 hour movie, 10 minutes of action

2 hour movie, 10 minutes of action


A bit like a football game.



"Worthington, we're being attacked by giant bats!"

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Saw this when it came out. Watched it again tonite.

Yah, it takes a while to get going, but then it really doesn't go very far.

Walter Pidgeon goes down with six different forms of ID.

Some of the brightest acrylic looking blood Ive ever seen.

Charlton Heston collects a paycheck.

I'd remake this thing with a real screenplay.

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Pffft, my suspension of disbelief has higher standards than that.

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What a strange little concoction this movie turned out to be.

It's Jaws without skill, without a shark. It's Dirty Harry without a worthy protagonist. It's Nashville without nuance.

Frankly, it's a mess. There's so much rote screenplay business and so many uninteresting characters that it's hard to hold it in your mind after you've seen it. Even the top-billed Heston and Cassavetes are given so little screen time that it's easy to forget they're even in the movie. I guess that's part of the "disaster movie tradition" though -- debase as many classic stars as possible while we wait for the carnage to begin.

Hey, there's Tom Bowers going up the ladder!

Great! Martin Balsam gets to wear a hat again. Ever since Psycho we've all known that Balsam with a hat is best Balsam.

Mitchell Ryan as Father Whoever -- sweet.

And that SWAT guy...wasn't he the SWAT guy in Robocop?!

Not to mention Cosell & Gifford making the calls, and Merv Frigging Griffin singing the nation anthem.

Oh, did I say "wait"? Yes, the subject line is a pretty fair assessment of the formula.

But what carnage. There's a small part of me that took real glee in the last ten minutes. Not just because I didn't care about the characters. Not just because I didn't expect so many of the prominent ones to get blasted unceremoniously. Not just because I've always wanted to see that smug Quincy get his. There's a real delirious thrill when a movie shoves in its chips and yells, "All in."

And this is followed immediately by some of the finest crowd mayhem I've ever seen in a movie. Really, they should give Oscars for "Best Human Stampede" and "Best Attempt to Make it Look Like Real People are in Danger", because Two-Minute Warning would've cashed in.

Then Heston throws down, as was his wont, and it's all over. I genuinely feel like I could've watched two full hours of people charging through exits and periodically getting pegged, but it wasn't to be. We were too busy hearing about the QB's knees (which went nowhere) and watching the pickpocket duo (which went nowhere).

Imagine my surprise when I began watching the broadcast TV version afterward and noted that it was a half hour longer. Not even morbid curiosity could sustain me through such a trial. Particularly considering that some of the film's few real virtues (no motive, chaos and sudden death, etc.) are removed to bring us...a tangential robbery?

Oh, and naming one of the QB's "Lloyd Braun", in retrospect, may have been a mistake. When Heston was shaking the assassin's corpse and demanding to know "Why, dammit?!" how many of us can resist shouting at the screen a la Costanza, "Don't you see! It's all because of Lloyd Braun!"

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Basically an R-rated ABC Movie of the Week with stars and swearing.

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Heston's limited screentime was a major part of what attracted him to sign on to the disaster films he did for Universal - a huge backend deal for about 10 days of work. I imagine that same reasoning is what persuaded him to sign on a decade later for that awful nighttime soap opera "The Colbys" - because it had a large ensemble cast, he was collecting a big paycheck for about two or three days work per week.

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It isn't made for ADHD people.

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^ This.

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Universal was out of their minds to think they could use their cookie-cutter disaster movie formula for an R-rated movie.

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