There is plenty of talent involved, and a story about a legendary mess of a movie being made sounded appealing. O'Toole is watchable in every movie I've ever seen him in, and this Oscar-nominated part is no different. But actually sitting down and watching this movie, it took me at least six sittings to make it through a mind-bogglingly slow 131-minute movie. By the last 45 minutes (how I made it that far into the movie I don't know), I was fast-forwarding through scenes as quick as I could. It's that rare movie I truly hate, but this one was pretty awful. It's not because it's a bad movie in itself. Anything but. It tries to be something else, a movie with a message, and fails miserably.
Spotted by two police officers at a highway diner, fugitive Cameron (Steve Railsback) flees through the woods and stumbles onto a movie set where a car crashes off a bridge into a river below, the stunt driver drowning inside accidentally. He continues running and ends up in a different scene being filmed, meeting possibly insane director of the film, Eli Cross (O'Toole). Incurring the wrath of the local sheriff (Alex Rocco) for the possible murder of the stunt man, Eli convinces him that Cameron is said stunt man and nothing's wrong. On the run, Cameron agrees and sticks around, learning how to be a stunt man. He has a love-hate relationship with the eccentric Eli and even falls for leading lady, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey). But when everything seems ideal, Cameron finds out Eli has a past with Nina, and now he has to attempt the dangerous driving stunt that killed his predecessor.
Where to start, where to start? I wasn't incredibly familiar with this movie going in and was only aware that O'Toole was the star. He's one of those few actors I will watch in anything, but more on that later. About 30 minutes into this movie, I wasn't quite sure what I was watching. Was it a dark comedy lampooning the movie-making industry? Was it a drama with some existential message about the bizarre nature of acting and making films? I didn't know, and I couldn't decide. That's never a good sign that far into the movie. What's worse is that it never resolves itself. The IMDB description says 'Action/Comedy/Drama.' I'm not quite sure what to call it even now.
The movie inside the movie is that O'Toole is directing a historical epic about a WWI hero on the run somewhere in Europe, running from German soldiers and fighters doing their damnedest to pick him off. As near as I can figure, it's supposed to be a trainwreck of a movie, one with the highest aspirations that you just know will fail. So is it an intentional dig that the movie we're watching seems as equally bad? The opening feels like a bizarre dream sequence, but the story never rights itself after that. Huge jumps in the story make it nearly impossible to follow or even keep up, and nothing is ever rightfully explained. Is Eli actually trying to kill Cameron? Why does the director embrace this admitted escaped convict so readily?
With 75 acting credits to his name, O'Toole worked with the gamut of directors, maybe the most famous being David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia. He had to see the good and bad, the calm and the agitated, the friendly and the enemies. He channels them all for this performance, rolling everything into one crazy, always entertaining, always mysterious director leading this mess of a movie. I was never sure of Eli's true intentions because he shows right away he is more interested in the safety of his movie than the actual people working on the movie. One outburst (watch HERE) is perfectly insane, one Christian Bale must have watched before his own blow-up. The movie is difficult to get through, but O'Toole's performance makes it somewhat bearable.
When O'Toole isn't on-screen though, the movie drops off in a big way. I don't know if Railsback is just a bad actor, or the character is poorly written, but there is nothing appealing about the Cameron character at all. His past and his breaking the law is left in the background for the most part, the revelation coming later in the proceedings thankfully. We're never rooting for him though, and his paranoia gets tedious quickly. Hershey is the same way, a cardboard cutout of a character who never becomes interesting. Allen Garfield's screenwriter and Charles Bail's veteran stunt man are underused in supporting parts that show this movie did have some potential. That's the whole problem. There's potential all over the place that never amounts to anything.
The Stunt Man <---trailer (1980): */****
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