we're on a mission from god wendy so i got that going darling looks like i picked the wrong way to quit sniffing blue light of my life we enjoy your films i thought they smelled bad on the outside welcome to vintage video where we're re-watching the 80s so you don't have to we'll be reviewing every major film release of the 1980s in real time over analyzing what you've seen and spoiling what you haven't i'm patrick o'reilly i'm jesse bayless and i'm richard wells and today marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the kidnapping of the president on august 15 1980. it was written by richard murphy based on a novel by charles templeton directed by george mendeluck and released by crown international pictures hey this is your neighbors uh earlier this year we had them release don't answer the phone and galaxina i believe maybe one other one or maybe that's it i think there was hearse the hearse possible yeah yeah i think it was because it had that cool logo at the beginning which i i totally didn't see you showed to me it's like i don't remember this at all in 1977 george templeton wrote the novel originally titled the hostage but published as the kidnapping of the president and it was quickly optioned to be adapted to film the biggest challenge when adapting to film was that in the book the president's kidnapping took place in new york which was moved to canada for a number of financial reasons because that's why they had uh that's why they had canadian actors yeah and for some reason english screenwriters yep because they kept saying bloody all the time i was like where is this supposed to be taking place that's just what everybody said in 1980. the film was released about six months prior to john hinckley's attempted assassination of ronald reagan but luckily higley blamed a different movie for inspiring him we open with a montage of newsreel footage of presidents making public appearances in open top cars as a band plays hail to the chief yeah i got really excited and then disappointed because the name came up and i said mindy sterling i was like oh cindy girling that's not who i wanted the person i wanted wasn't even born when this movie came out mindy sterling was totally bored that's frau farbis not actually i was thinking of the violin lady what is her name lindsay sterling she's even younger than mindy that's what i'm saying we pan across mountain tops and end on a spider web while a person out of focus behind it tramples through a swamp he is pursued by members of a gorilla army who loose an attack dog on him that tears his throat out on the ground another soldier with a gun and a dog corners a second man on the run he shoots out the captives knees when the man brandishes a machete and asks the crippled man where mendoza is but he won't talk as punishment for his silence the soldier with the help of arriving friends uses the man's machete to remove some of his fingers i think i i yeah i was like did he cut his arm off and then when they show the white shark no his arms are still there it looks very much like they were going to cut his whole hand off yeah unless it's just like it's cut off but it's just still really close to it or if it was like he just buried it in the dirt but because we don't see what happened and there's no insert of the fingers we have no idea what really happened here it seemed like a cutaway for tv but then we just saw a guy's throat ripped out yeah a woman pops out with a gun to observe what's going on and then sulks back into the plants disappointed later she's watching her face in a river when the gunman finds her and says that she will see her sister soon he tries to cheer her up for a minute here before slitting her throat and dumping her in the river because he says you know too much in a nearby bar a man is trying desperately to get a hold of an ambassador by phone when a pair of gorillas bust through the doors with machine guns killing him and the bartender just before he dies the desperate man stops in his tracks behind a pickup truck outside and is shot backwards up into the bed crushing several crates containing clearly live chickens with his body weight i missed the chickens yeah there were chickens in the boxes and when literally when the body falls out you see like chickens like push the boxes back up because he's just laying on top of chickens the voice speaking through the abandoned phone lets us know that this was mendoza they were looking for and uh that he got through to the ambassador's office but he didn't get to finish the call you know this whole section would have been a great opportunity to explain what the hell these people want yeah or what they stand for or where we are we're somewhere we know that much looks like somewhere i mean i think they say later something about south america i just don't we don't know where specifically yeah he's a the villain is a freedom fighter but it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be free yeah he's not freeing anyone but himself yeah free or mind and the rest will follow no there you go got it real man is that a song reference or are you making an l.a story reference both okay what i don't understand is i'm assuming mendoza must have had some kind of knowledge of his plan to kidnap the president yeah and were these guys against it is that why they are being taken out i mean i i don't think it's they're for it the guy who slipped the lady's throat is the one who commits the crime no no why did he take these three people out at the beginning i don't understand why he's taken them out i'm assuming that they were part of his team that were trying to get away it also seems like everyone who has the knowledge that they need to know about the kidnapping is already in the united states or in canada yeah uh so it just doesn't seem like these men would have very much pertinent information yeah it's not helpful because he because even even the guy didn't know about the truck he knew nothing about the truck that was being built for him really only one person knows the whole plan anyway yeah so like anyway i i'm now i'm now i'm thinking backwards to all this stuff is like this whole opening gambit doesn't make any sense you weren't supposed to watch this movie a second time you weren't even supposed to watch it the first time in my opinion that's probably true in the oval office president adam scott of parks and rec fame no it's a different adam scott is meeting with some intelligence officials the fbi and cia directors are not the directors but the people running those departments to discuss an international incident seemingly orchestrated by the vice president without anyone else's approval we just barely touch on this and never really come back to it well i mean it kind of comes back but it doesn't doesn't seem to have any consequences no but whatever he did it was without the president's approval herb morris walks jerry o'connor who i might accidentally call jerry o'connell over the course of the day down to the oval office uh through a long haul and they're discussing some concerns they have about an upcoming trip to toronto obviously the president thinks that this vice president stuff is more important until his chief of staff hands them some classified material on their concerns it always bothers me when top secret binders just say eyes only and don't specify whose eyes like there's any other way to take in images and text on paper wait a minute is i i saw that and i didn't realize that that's a thing that people write on documents top secret stuff yeah it's like for your eyes only but it just says eyes only really yeah people will write that on there okay there's a whole james bond movie titled about it yep yes but it'll say for your eyes only but even that is like who's eyes yeah it's just specific if i found out if i if i'm reading it those are my eyes that is correct actually if you were reading it it said for your eyes only it would imply somebody else somebody's watching me oh god only who can prevent forest fires you pressed you referring to me that is incorrect the correct answer is you the file contains photos of renounced terrorist roberto asanti presumed dead although my note here says presumed dude and i prefer that the chief of staff tells them that they have five minutes with scott o'connor tells the president about the interrupted phone call in the bar and the evidence they've collected that asante didn't die with guevara and bolivia like they thought the whole time the cia and fbi guys are still sitting here in the office and the cia guy can't help but [ __ ] all over everything o'connell is trying to say this is the second movie about a criminal mastermind assumed dead by all except for the expert with a plan to stop him my note here for this is is pretty simple it's like dude you don't have to like him or listen to him but just let him do his job he has to communicate this information yeah that's all he has to do it is up to you to take that information and continue to do something with it but at least let him just speak his mind yeah o'connor cites as evidence of asante's work the deaths of three people in south america including a known associate of asantes an ex-weatherman named erica steiner for those as unfamiliar as i was this is not a dead meteorologist but rather a member of the weather underground a small violent offshoot of the students for democratic society who claimed credit for a series of bombings including one that demolished their own headquarters by exploding prematurely not unlike our friend haddix in a small circle of friends earlier this year likely a direct reference to the group so okay so that this group this is based on an actual event or a person no but they're just trying to connect the this gorilla army with you know who che guevara is and you've heard of the weathermen so it's like it's south american terrorists and like domestic socialist terrorists okay when the president says assuming you're right and asanti is alive and wants to kill me in toronto on the 8th what would we do the head of the cia for some stupid reason suggests call in the mounted police because it's their jurisdiction when clearly defending the u.s president has always been the authority of the secret service since the program was born in the 1860s and they've always traveled with the president outside the oval office morris asks what o'connor is trying to prove going up against dietrich from the cia and he says the cia had orders to terminate asante and they blew it president scott practices an upcoming speech with his wife and she calls the script cluttered she has worries about the upcoming trip and mentions not wanting to ride around in an open-top car because it'll mess her hair up she says yeah but he calls her out on it yeah apparently jerry o'connell oh i got he already got me doing it jerry o'connor uh went to her and morris did one of them yeah already they already went to her and like basically like we're trying to back channel the threat yeah like through her i feel like it's almost like if you were tattling on somebody it's like we'll tell her and then she'll get him to do it i told mom on you it's like ah your husband has a really cool head a shame if something were to happen to it you know magically you know what doesn't make sense though is when they're all concerned about him riding in some open-topped vehicle yeah but then when he gets into the briefing the first thing he says was that assassinations don't happen from far away like 90 of them happen in close range for some reason though everyone seems very sure that he's on the verge of assassination so he must not have a great approval record or something asanti exits the train and bumps into a quote-unquote blind man the two leave the station together this seems totally unnecessary as they're actually drawing more attention to themselves this way than they would as two guys just meeting at a train station and at this point asante is believed dead so no one's even looking for him yeah so i don't get what the purpose of this like it's like a married couple like you know it's like oh we'll have to pretend like we're married because they're looking for single people yeah but in this case no one's looking for anybody yeah certainly not maury jacob's character nope the vice president is called to the president's office and criticized for it seems like accepting a bribe for 25 thousand dollars from a criminal overlord named joe spring glass and whatever this was is connected to the international incident i mean i don't think it was a direct bribe it sounded like it was a shady political contribution right but it was clearly like here's 25 000 can you take care of this person for me overseas yeah and somehow as a vice president he had the power to do that scott orders his resignation and the vp's wife wants him to fight it asante apologizes to erica's sister linda when he meets her he lies that she was shot in the back by the enemy but it took me the second viewing to realize that he's the one who killed her yeah because when he kills her he's wearing a hat that covers his distinctive bald spot so i didn't even realize it was supposed to be the same guy he looks very different with and without the hat yeah yeah and the and the kind of scruff that he had yeah the blind man describes the inner workings of this armored truck that he has rigged to explode and when he mentions antennas asanti is very upset about the possibility that their frequency might be jammed blindy also mentions that people get paranoid about bombing ingredients so he had to wire it up himself with what he had and when asante asks the seemingly benign question how much wiring did you use the guy explodes there's a thousand feet of whirring in that truck linda tells asante to leave harvey alone he worked really hard on this yeah i had to trust that the vehicle works according to plan yeah this dynamic between them all it's very weird yeah it also never comes back that he did this all himself like you would think that the whole point of that is that he screwed something up and something's gonna go wrong and none of it does i guess except for the engine overheating but that seems unrelated to the technical aspect of the treatment that night linda talks to asante about america's arrogance and his history fighting with govera just as she's telling him that her sister loved him and she understands why he's suddenly handcuffing her inside the van and tearing her clothes off to forcibly make out with her she struggles against it for a few seconds but then i think gives up and is just like yep fine i'm into it now at the end of this scene yeah i don't like that at all no because if you keep pushing hard enough they just like you yeah right right o'connor gives a slideshow presentation about political assassinations he advises them to spend less time looking for guns and bulges and more time looking at faces and mouths that look strange which is terrible advice like i'm not a i'm not a secret agent or a secret service agent he almost kind of goes onto like a psychotic tangent he's like it's the mouth and the eyes there's just something in it nice it's like a doll's eyes but it's like what if someone just had a weird mouth you just tackle that guy like the guy behind him had a gun but this guy's mouth that's gonna hold up in court for sure it explains a lot of the failures later in the film that he doesn't think looking for bulges or guns is important on air force one morris warns the president again that nothing is happening with the asante situation and the president says look the ci told me he's dead and besides if he wants me dead he'll kill me there's no use in exercising sensible cautions to ensure continuity of government morris agrees yeah but seems sick or intoxicated and then collapses on his way out of the room i thought he was in on it and was having like nerves yeah i was like yeah he's got a flop sweat he's something something's up with this guy see and i'll spoil right now that this whole plot had nothing to do with dietrich but i was sure that dietrich poisoned him because he was in on it oh he was the one who was saying asante is dead don't don't follow this lead yeah i was sure that he was being poisoned too when when he when he fell over because we don't know why that guy fell over he just died on the plane it seems he's not connected to the criminals well i guess it doesn't really matter though because the only difference that it makes is who's going to run the operation right but from a film perspective it makes no difference because you could have just opened with william shatner running the department that's true yeah and it seemed like he was running it anyway he's the one demanding time with the president anyway this guy collapses on the plane the explosive armored vehicle pulls out of a barn harvey expresses a childlike excitement as he drives and asanti and linda seem romantically intertwined already they're like she's like sitting behind him in the on the bench seat with her arms around him while they're driving it's very weird and uh they're all in uniforms as though they were the drivers of this truck sharpshooters from the secret service take their places atop a building in toronto where the president intends to speak they get the chief of police of toronto in their crosshairs and literally pull the trigger at him yeah i was like even if your gun isn't loaded which it appears that it isn't or at least isn't isn't in a firing position gun safety is rule number one you don't point a gun and pull the trigger at anything you don't intend to kill yeah it's 100 like this is the only time in the entire movie that they do pull the trigger because these are the most useless sharpshooters in the history of they're perfectly useful the problem is that they're never given the okay yeah i also do like that the chief of police has the force yeah it can sense since he knows what they're doing up there he's like no if there's any more of that nonsense the better you'll find yourself on traffic detail for the rest of your mortal days understood i saw that finger move slightly i'm gonna bust you guys down to traffic detail if you keep [ __ ] around uh but it's a gotcha the guns aren't loaded yet and it's perfectly okay to pull the trigger of an unloaded gun pointed at government official o'connor is called to the toronto airport to respond to an emergency back on air force one over the dying head of the secret service dietrich the cia jerk is trying to wrestle control of the secret service away from o'connor second in command he's so insistent that asante is dead and that o'connor can be relieved of duty that i'm certain he's involved in the plot already he probably poisoned morris right here on this plane even that didn't happen the bomb truck starts overheating so they pull up to a gas station and cops pull up right next to them and get real curious about what they're up to yeah i was like what what is why do you care so much yeah what is this all about the guy's like walking around and climbing on top of the vehicle like looking in the window cupping his hands over the window yeah like okay if you have engine trouble that's one thing and they're like oh hey like you know maybe you should do this or that like offer some advice right or be concerned that they're like oh this is an armored vehicle you are in a compromised position having your engine out right now so maybe we should be concerned about you but instead they're being all investigatory yeah one of them notices suspicious wiring under the hood and right as he's pointing it out to his partner he gets stabbed in the chest by asante and dies instantly yeah and and what suspicious wiring like there's wires in the car okay like you don't know anything about this armored car yeah and i thought that was gonna come into play later when they opened the hood to like do stuff there's gonna be like some seafood it's just like oh is there something under the hood too no there's nothing under the hood it's just a normal car on the front side so i don't know what he was even pointing at but uh his partner comes around the truck and harvey shoots him as the cops dying he grabs his kind and points it at harvey who starts to apologize i'm and then he gets shot and as they're both dying harvey complains i said i was and then he dies just like that he tried to apologize to the guy that he killed the gas station attendant runs away and asanti makes linda shoot him in the back with a shotgun for basically no reason other than to call more attention to their plan asante fires the shotgun at the gas station to blow the whole place up right i was so confused by this like if you had left three dead guys on the ground in the middle of this what seemed to be nowhere gas station it would have been quite a while before somebody realized what was happening but now there's nothing like pulling in absolutely in the sky yeah and there's a guy who's you know it'd be one thing if you were trying to burn up the bodies but they're nowhere near nowhere near the fire and one of them is way out far away with shotgun blasts in his back right you're not covering up evidence with this explosion he might even still be alive on the radio a dj cuts in mid song to tell anyone interested about slight changes in the president's transportation schedule the kind of information the secret service has never shared with anyone because it's a clear matter of national security well okay it's not so specific but yes they do have they do post the times that he's going to be in this area down to like the half hour for traffic concerns especially in l.a right but don't break into a song like it's an emergency notification that's true that's right i agree with that but i do think that they will tell you in general where the where and when the motorcade is going to be blocking traffic but what they don't tell you is what they said here which was the president's plane was delayed 30 minutes due to some sort of incident but there is no change in his arrival schedule and traffic pattern so it's like if there's no change why are we saying anything at all yeah and all they did say was that it's gonna somehow affect that's the time that it takes the motorcade to get to the airport to pick him up so there's just a bigger bombing window at the airport if you wanted to kill him there o'connor meets the president at the plane apparently morris is okay but hospitalized but still o'connor is now in charge of the department he collects the president's cufflinks and watch for some reason why i don't need this i looked everywhere online for some kind of precedent of the president president yeah i don't get it he takes his cufflinks and his watch which maybe those are the only metal things why why'd you take his medal i i i he also just like wordlessly gestures to him like okay now here's the part where you do this and you're like what what what do you mean this is the part where you do take off your cuff links on your watch and i would assume that this is something that like secret service knows about and that they had some person on set that was telling them what the secret service would do in a situation and gave them this piece of advice like oh you would take the cufflinks in the watch and they would definitely explain it in the movie if they were going to use that but also they clearly didn't have anyone involved in the secret service advising them because the whole rest of the movie is a testament to how stupid they are and how badly planned this whole toronto yeah it would be an embarrassment if somebody had been involved in this that was actually part of the secret service but anyone listening if you know for some reason why the secret service would remove the president's cufflinks and watch yeah it's very weird but not his wedding ring nope the armored truck pulls into toronto and asanti gets out to argue with a man guarding a barricade to block a road for the president's motorcade asante tells him i got 50 000 in that truck which seems like hardly anything considering but he asked the guy what's more important fifty thousand dollars or orders from the national government to block a road for the american president and the guy chooses very poorly and moves the small barricade the sharpshooters see all of this happening yeah this would never happen yeah but the sharpshooters are watching it happen from the top of the building and immediately they're like well let's check the bank okay yeah there's no bank deliveries approved on the schedule so let's let's go ahead and put a stop to this oh we don't have anybody down there to radio two yep yeah so i guess we'll just start going down there well they they call it in but i would have taken a pot shot at that guard saying hey open your frickin eyes dude how come he didn't have the bank schedule but for some reason there's no security within a few minutes so asante is free to carry a bunch of bags into the building that the president will be speaking near soon i don't know what these bags are right he just carried a bunch of bags into a bathroom and changed i i assumed they were the things that he changed into so he's got alternate clothes and you know dynamite in there um why yeah so so that when he pulls up he looks like he is an armored truck driver and he was already wearing an armored truck uniform yes and then he goes into the into the mall and changes into a different outfit with dynamite on it just seems like you could be wearing all of that the whole time but they but they're looking for an armored truck driver well but i feel like when he parked the armored truck there was no one around that he could have exited the truck in his street clothes and just well they didn't know that or even exited in the in the armored truck uniform and then taken off that jacket and thrown it away yeah and then you have the rest of the clothes under it turned it inside out like like ethan hunt yeah he's got a whole different looking jacket on the outside the president climbs out of the back seat in his motorcade to sit high up on the back of an open top car and his wife is freaking out about it the president's security eventually gets to the armored truck but it's locked so now they're just looking for a driver assuming there's no one inside even though they can't see inside asante elbows his way to the front of a crowd on either side of the red carpet the president will be walking down which is flanked by a just a rope just a velvet rope to keep the riff raff out uh he's claiming to be a member of the mexican press looking to get a photograph of the president and literally steps over the rope onto the carpet right next to a cop as if part of this plane was to be intentionally arrested before the president even shows up the clock strikes three and the men outside the armor truck radio to o'connor that they can't find a driver one of them notices linda inside getting in the driver's seat and she fires a gun with a silencer through the driver's side door to kill the guy that's speaking to o'connor on the radio it's totally an armored car she flips a little circle thing oh yeah so she can actually stick the barrel out oh i did i missed that yeah but i don't understand why she does this i don't even like just drive away because more than just this one guy knows that this truck is a potential problem so it's not like she's preventing the spread of information and she is planning to just drive away anyways so why why shoot him just drive also she if she'd just driven away the second she dropped the guy off they wouldn't even be tracking the truck anymore because it took them 10 minutes to even get to the vehicle so and she's not waiting for him to come back to it so she could have left a long time ago but she didn't do that they also shoot out one of the tires which i thought was going to play into something no but doesn't no she pulls away as soon as the second agent just runs for his life when he sees the first one gets shot in reality this car would be boxed in and the second guy would be a returning fire but that's not what happens here there's everybody's on foot there's no vehicles in canada when the president starts moving down the red carpet the crowd on either side of the rope that's protecting the president they're they're just completely flooding past the ropes and at the same time o'connor is realizing that he will be fired for this [ __ ] up so he's but fired for for the fact that they're mobbing why are they mobbing the u.s president i mean presumably these are a bunch of canadians first of all so like i don't think that they i mean they're really nice people they aren't gonna mob anybody just saying sorry sorry but secondly like it's not the beatles it's the president yeah people would do this for the president i guarantee you canadians no not happening no probably not canadians but while he's getting uh while he realizes he's going to get fired he's getting a call from the guys at the armored truck that it has broken away from them and is headed directly for the president four agents are now firing on the speeding truck and they pop one tire which as we said yeah does nothing as the president moves down the line asante introduces himself as mexican press and when scott reaches out for a handshake asante handcuffs them together and reveals his dynamite fest this is the part of the plan that seems the least thought out yeah you have to rely that you can push yourself through a crowd and get the president to shake your hand out of a thousand people that he's not shaking hands with everybody yeah how that you would have to get him close enough to do this and to get a pair of handcuffs which isn't totally easy if you're not like practiced at it in a mob yeah um i thought at first that he was holding a dead man switch but he isn't no so they would definitely have just shot him here yeah that would have been the end of it well especially because i think the sharpshooters say they have the shot yeah but uh the thing in his hand is just a trigger for a different random explosion to scare people away and uh one one of the sharp shooters nearly saves the day when o'connor bravely demands hold your fire nobody shoots the police in charge of stopping the truck have placed a single beam 2x4 barricade in the road unbelievably the truck is able to drive right through the barricade that i could probably also walk through asante tells o'connor to order the men pursuing the truck to cease fire to help them kidnap the president and he obliges for whatever reason one guy tries to tackle the truck as it pulls up into the park and uselessly bounces off of the hood uh how holbrook's reactions to this whole situation are so authentic it's perfect it's like just shoot this guy yeah it's like you're wasting my time like shoot the guy i'm the president i'm giving you a direct order the president thinks this is all a dumb joke and demands they arrest this terrorist come on o'connor arrest him get to get this thing off me but the security detail all ignore his direct orders asante says one move and we're all dead and o'connor takes this very literally and just freezes in place o'connor tells the president to just be kidnapped do as he says i know this man what what are you talking about no don't do that don't don't say you know him first yeah but also that's not that that's not an argument the president seems just as flabbergasted as i am that he's being asked to surrender to terrorists hopefully o'connor loses his job for this the president says he'll never get away with this and o'connor says please do as he says mr president it's like what [ __ ] you no i don't want to do that you know the the the speed hold tastic to shoot the hostage yeah like this totally plays into this yeah you you make the president completely immobile if i was hell probably i just go limp yeah just collapse to the ground he's not going to but also when he says like get into the truck and it's like no i'm not going to get into the truck and it's like are we just going to stand here until midnight and you explode all right let's see if that happens yeah well or he blows the ball rope right there but i don't think i mean that's not his that wasn't his plan that's not his plan that's the thing is like i don't understand i don't actually understand what his plan is because i feel like there's so many ways that he could be foiled in this explosion thing because he really doesn't want to blow up the president right he wants something else he wants leverage yeah the other thing is that if you're going to do this kind of a plan you have to have something that you can in person and provably threaten the president with you can't say someone somewhere has a trigger for this bomb and it's like i don't believe you you have no proof of that and i'm not just going to give you the president because you said that that's like if i was getting pulled over and i told the cop hey there's ten sharpshooters with you in their crosshairs so just let me go like no you're under arrest also you're threatening me yeah exactly well and for that matter if he's going to say somebody else is in the audience with an alternate trigger for this explosion if i die they're going to trigger this why not say there's 10 people out there like just exaggerate because if they find your one person which spoiler alert they do yeah you're screwed but yeah one of the guys says so do we let him put the president in that truck and then o'connor says we don't have any other choice yes you do the other choice is to not let him do that you guys have a hundred guns everyone in the security detail is guilty of treason the president is forced against his will by his own staff to get in this truck inside the truck scott is handcuffed to the wall but not before he makes an attempt on asante's life which is very quickly shut down with a throat punch but i did like that hal holbrook was like i'm gonna [ __ ] strangle this guy nobody else is gonna do it i'll kill him right here i don't care uh a santee tucks all the dynamite into a box in the back of the truck and dietrich from the cia shows up and he's like what the [ __ ] [Laughter] you didn't let that man take the president inside the truth get 30 sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest oh well that's that's fine then that's a that's a great argument to let him take the president he was covered in dynamite did you see any dynamite some it was on him it's on us it's all over the place dietrich says he will take over secret service since the current leadership has managed to lose the president like an hour into the job the toronto chief of police says actually he's going to take over the secret service which makes the least sense either way priority one would be getting everyone as far away from this bomb as possible especially the officials discussing their plan within earshot of a truck that we've established is not sound proof suddenly the truck pulls away and linda jumps out and down a stairwell she starts shooting back at the agents and sets off a smoke bomb before ducking through the door at the bottom of the stairwell defeating the purpose of the smoke bomb a whole swarm of agents chased the van out of the parking lot on [ __ ] foot what is going on we accidentally established that there was a motorcade 10 minutes ago but every car that should be blocking this truck is just not doing that and there's no aerial coverage and there's also no there's no perimeter established it's just it's just oh he's taking him that way just just just two sharp shooters on a building that was so far away yeah and a hundred agents on foot the truck comes to a complete stop in front of the stage the president was going to speak at a group of agents follow linda down the stairs and into the parking structure but there's really nothing to worry about because by now the perimeter is secure and she for sure just can't drive away asante tells everyone with a pa system on the truck about all the booby traps that he's installed and that they will get the president back when his demands are met he also tells the crowds to stay yes he he doesn't want them to clear the crowds out yeah and i think that's an important point i want to come back to that one first can we talk a little bit about these booby traps sure because up until this point in the movie i assume i assume they're live this whole time and it has not been like okay now that we're in place i'm gonna turn them off yeah we do see him flip all the switches after he says that oh we do yeah oh okay okay i think i missed that because i was just like how up until this point has all like driving down a bumpy road yeah getting the tire shot out you know driving over a curb and through a crowd how has this not set anything off that definitely would have okay also said the car has an electric skin which was like does it zap you if it tries to get gets you yeah is it like galaxina yeah but no it's it's i guess it's just got wires everywhere that if any one of those wires is damaged and there are also there's also heat sensors all over the thing so if they try and take a blow torch to any side of this truck they're going to set it off asante steps out of the van and shows that he's unarmed and demands an escort to room 417 of a nearby skyscraper at which point they should have shot him several times somehow lindo just makes her way back into the crowd and uh the they escort asanti through the crowds into the building the building is just full of people too and they're just pushing asante through all of these people the vice president is informed what has happened and that he is now the acting president and his wife is super hot for that o'connor meets the prime minister of canada and asks him to pretend that this part of canada is america until he can get the president back o'connor's plan is to do everything the bad guy wants and he can't risk anyone interrupting asante's plan the prime minister says will you pay a ransom o'connor says it's not up to him but if it was he for sure would he doesn't say that i'm editorializing the prime minister says fine toronto is america now asante's first demand is 100 million dollars in diamonds and two planes right and he also must appear occasionally at the window to room 417 and they have till midnight to deliver the diamonds they have until midnight yeah that's the deadline already also 417 doesn't appear to be a room because it's like got uh it's like at the end of the hall it's like at the end of the hall it's got like a railings and an emergency exit and no carpet it's like concrete floors yeah i was like this isn't a room what is this okay so let's come back to the crowd thing yeah obviously the the reasoning that asante had was i have a person i need to put them in the crowd so that they are my second set of eyes that they could you know trigger this bomb if needed if i'm not if i don't show back up right yeah so that's why he says not for the crowd to disperse but the crowd that we're seeing here is like super happy and excited to be there yeah and like people are joining it you know or they are letting people join it whereas really it should be up like these people are technically hostages like they're told by georgia they can't leave like that guy said that but the authorities never told them they couldn't leave but i think they would be telling them they can't leave because the terrorists told them not to leave or he's going to blow up the president so i think that they're preventing them from leaving because why the hell would everybody not just leave i think they would i think the only reason that the people stuck around is because they wanted to see the president explode this whole this because they were like oh no it's an event so weird yeah i don't get it maybe i can collect part of the truck that the president died in and sell it on ebay later but they're like happy to be there but if like if they're being kept there against their will they shouldn't be happy to be there i wouldn't want to be anywhere near a terrorist but also asante didn't give them nearly enough instructions for this crowd because they could have just one at a time taking the people out and been like hey what do you have a bomb on you anywhere you have a gun we're gonna search everybody and if you're clean leave yeah or or what you do is you get every member of the police force to go dress up in plain clothes and one at a time you have the crowd to leave and just yeah so the whole crowd is nothing but police yeah um i haven't noticed just the end of the blues brothers yeah um i have a note here because the whole movie this was driving me nuts the weird soundtrack with the sound effects yeah like i said is this part of the sound track or is this local i think it was supposed to be music it's somebody's just weird experimental soundscapes played over top of the scenes where we're thinking that there's they were always for when they were showing like the wiring in the truck and stuff yeah um it's like it's like musical cues that are supposed to be sound effects it's like they don't have time for sound effects so anytime you see a sound effect like a clock ticking it's got to be a musical instrument playing it's very weird uh speaking with the vice president o'connor says that he also asked for two escape planes and o'connor the current head of the secret service also inexplicably admits to the acting president that he doesn't think the president is super important people die all the time and there's a chain of command the presidency never dies i mean the man may even a president is internationally respected as president kennedy but the presidency skips a beat and goes on the vp is obviously delighted to hear this simultaneously excited and forgetting that he may soon be the president o'connor says that if we stall too long he could kill the president and then the acting president says what would he have to gain from that and o'connor says he'd become a martyr to the cause but i think the vp was talking about what asante would have to gain yeah not the president because a martyr isn't the person who survives killing other people for a cause linda literally pulls the kill switch out of her pocket with a big [ __ ] red button on it so that she can see it while she's checking the window for asante the first time also there doesn't appear to be any kind of safety on this button yeah i'm very concerned when she puts it back into her pocket in a crowded boat someone bumps into her pants are tighter on me than they were yesterday shouldn't have that turkey also cause i thought she was screaming i'm pregnant later on i did too but we'll get to that yeah uh suddenly the tnt sounds like it's boiling in the box in the back of the armor truck for some reason yeah but i think it's just another poorly chosen music cue o'connor and asante move alone through the building toward the window in 417. asante nods out the window and linda puts the button away that she would never have taken out in the control room the secret service team have determined that the hairs found in the hat and the parking structure belong to a blonde woman they could also have noticed that it was a blonde woman who got out of the car but apparently they didn't notice that so it should be easy to send home all of the non-blonde non-women in this crowd now on a whim o'connor says can you get me a picture of the dead woman erica steiner and her sister linda steiner in the white house the vice president is officially declared acting president and for some reason the treasury secretary is the one briefing everyone on the president's kidnapping when the cabinet learns that the diamonds asante demanded have already been located and are a half hour from delivery they are infuriated by the precedent that night it is raining in the park and the crowds are all still standing in place the vote on whether or not to pay the terrorists is currently three to three which leaves the acting president the tiebreaker which everyone assumed would be against paying he has the option of voting either way or abstaining but he wants to kick the can down the road to the secretaries of state and interior who are still on route now so that would make what three four five five people is it three or three is that six right now it's three to three so eight how many people are generally in the cabinet i think that some of them are on route and some of them are just not available okay i think you would call them and say hey no that doesn't work well you're on your way can you uh help us decide whether or not to kill the president but also i just think that you know we have an established rule that we do not negotiate with terrorists even in 1980 that was pretty simple yes so why are we debating this at all they're pretending like it makes the difference that it's the president over just a general hospital even more so than than a traditional thing where it's just an average joe you really can't do it when it's an important person because then you're just going to encourage everybody to kidnap the president well i and i agree um my my perspective would be we're not going to negotiate but we need to drag this out as long as possible to give us a chance yeah so if that means giving him diamonds temporarily until we shoot him in the face yeah um then we just need to do that to buy time uh the diamonds aren't gonna go anywhere uh uh that's my that's my thinking um but i think that that's giving the movie more credit i don't i don't think the movie is thinking like that i think the movie is just thinking no we are going to negotiate with her but i don't even i don't even think you can partially pretend to to to negotiate with them because that has the same effect of encouraging people who might think that they could get what they wanted well as long as you're very public about the fact that it did not work out well for that person i don't even think that matters though because you just have to have this firm stance that is unwavering or it does not work yeah once they have voted he promises not to abstain but he doesn't want to be the [ __ ] who looks like he killed the president on purpose for his office saul malone one of the men voting in the cabinet reads a quote to the room from the acting president that basically boils down to we do not negotiate with terrorists later richard's wife richards is the vice president later the vice president's wife is furious at malone for bringing this quote up not realizing that it's actually better for her husband if he's held the belief for a long time that they shouldn't negotiate with terrorists i can't get a handle on her motive here because she tells richards that if he doesn't pay the ransom that people will call him a murderer but if he does the president will owe him one and he might get elected later earlier it seemed like she was just desperate to be the first lady but now it sounds like she's saying she would rather save the president and have him owe her husband a favor and assume he'll be elected then actually see him killed and her husband just immediately become the president yeah or at the very least try and then he still becomes president yeah but it seems like because the earlier the president had said i don't want you on the ticket yeah just like to me that sounds like we're in an election year or coming up on an election yeah yeah so he wouldn't be president for very long uh because he had mentioned that it would split the party if he tried to run on his own yeah so he doesn't want to primary the president but uh but the weird thing here is that the vice president says you know what i've wanted this presidency more than anybody but i'm glad you're not making this decision but it's like why are you glad like it seemed like what she was talking about doing was what most people would think was the nice thing to do even if it's the wrong thing to do what she's talking about doing is the nice thing to do and he's making her sound like a dick for wanting to save the president well i guess because she's doing it because she she's doing it very cold-hearted like like she's scheming like no no you need to save the president because then you can become president not because we think it's the right thing to do but if she were actually scheming she would say oh kill the president that's a shortcut compared to the other plan which is like there's a 10 percent chance that you'd be the president next we see the president in the truck for just a moment before cutting to a miniature and just like in raised the titanic i thought we were supposed to buy this as the real truck for a second i was like oh god that's a terrible model of the truck yeah and then they zoom out i was like oh no i i changed my mind that's an excellent context is important uh they're planning a way to communicate with the president and they've made a very good model of the truck complete with like the full paint job and everything totally unnecessary yeah like it's got like the removable pieces so you can see the cross sections and the interiors uh the plan here is to put a limpet mic underneath the truck via underground tunnels in the park i don't know how they're gonna get don knotts down there yeah that would be incredible the walls of the van have heat sensors to prevent torching through but the floor is two inches of steel and they likely would never have considered heat sensoring the ground because it's not a viable point of entry for a torch i don't know why that matters because they're not talking about doing a blowtorch to put the microphone on the truck they're just talking about putting the microphone on the truck okay but let me get this straight though yes there's tunnels underneath this square but my assumption is that you still have to cut through some amount of concrete yes how is that not setting off with these sensors yeah it should be you're vibrating underneath the truck that's the worst thing you could do the the movie made it seem like this ventilation duct was just underneath the carpet yeah yes he literally just died layer of carpet truck that's how this works right i'm surprised if the truck had been driving a few inches to the side it would have just fallen into this ventilation system and wait a minute because she got out of the truck yeah and jumped over a thing went through a door that went down into a parking garage this is a parking garage there's no ducts down there well there might be ducts above the parking garage between the parking garage and the car yes i think i think that's the implication oh my goodness because it shows them going up into the ducts in the mall i don't know this whole thing is spatially weird but either way for some reason now we're talking about how thick the walls of the truck are and the heat sensors even though they're just talking about opening up a line of communication here's a couple options that i came up with off the top of my head a demand a line of communication otherwise you can't be sure that the president is alive anyway and there's no reason to negotiate with this guy or b walk up to the truck and just talk to the president because they've never made any rule against that and the truck isn't soundproof so just walk up to it and say mr president are you okay here's what's going on but see why just don't do it because there's nothing there's nothing helpful about this line like you're literally just going to call the president to be like hey how's it going again i guess just your first point was just for proof of life yeah but yeah because he can't really do anything i mean he does some things but they didn't know that that was an option yeah he gets a little daughtering too when we get to that point yeah did you know that this thing is made of wood yeah asante seems to misunderstand what he has hostage and he repeats the demand to o'connor that says that his time bomb is a threat to world order but it's not it's just a truck with a guy in it and he says if you push the button you know we'll just then we have a different president it doesn't it's not like america is going to crumble because you blew up one guy but he's pretending like he has everything all the cards the president is just trying to will his handcuffs off when he leans back frustrated and taps his head on the wall which he realizes from the sound and feel is actually wood painted to look like metal dietrich keeps asking o'connor what his plans are and o'connor hands out orders to his men and disperses photos of linda and tells them to commandeer press cameras to scan the crowd for some reason o'connor is giving orders to dietrich the head of the cia who is still here for some reason despite his jurisdictional irrelevance and isn't the ca not allowed to operate in overseas yeah or yeah oh yeah they are overseas they're mine yeah i keep forgetting that they're in toronto the clock strikes 6 30 but it looks much later than that a deranged james franco-looking gentleman is pretending to orchestrate the music being performed by a nearby marching band inside the truck the president is just peeling away at the paneling and insulation of this truck in a seemingly deliberate attempt to set off the bomb don't you think that the terrorist guy should have told the president about all the things that are going to explode with the yeah you know prevent him from trying to escape and just blowing himself up yeah that would be helpful to the terrorists to have said that but he didn't suddenly gunshots ring out as secret service agents are chasing the lunatic conductor full speed toward the truck o'connor follows the man onto an ice rink in rain and is slipping too much to keep up the man insists that he's a soldier of christ and the lord works through him and o'connor half indulges the man come here come here i want to talk i know what works for me i know that but come here i want to talk to you o'connor tells the sharpshooters to hold their fire again again stupidly because you don't want to shoot this guy right next to the president or let him get any closer to the truck and risk the bomb being set off you should kill him right here well and he's but he's also clearly an unarmed man those sharpshooters can take him out by putting a bullet in his leg yeah yeah for sure but he says don't shoot i wanted to get closer to the president so the man keeps running and then o'connor says before killing the man with a shot right next to the president which you know all you have to do is be you know a little bit off and you accidentally killed the president or blew this truck up because you were trying to kill someone else the sharpshooters are probably furious because they could have taken that guy out 30 seconds ago without letting him get so close to the president and now they don't get to kill anybody the secret service locate linda in the crowd from footage on the cameras just as the other team is ready to attach the microphone to the truck while they watch linda on the monitor the toronto chief asks out loud where has she got that detonator hidden to which o'connor replies in her pocket not realizing he was obviously joking because the woman has both hands in her pockets and no bag or backpack so that's obviously where it is president scott eats either a york peppermint patty or some foam insulation that he found in the truck it's a good thing i keep my pockets full of candy at the last second o'connor aborts the microphone plan fearing that linda will see them under the truck and blow it up needlessly foiling everyone's plans they wait for her to look up at the signal and when the clock chimes they place the microphone under the truck it's so small that there's no way she could have seen it from this far away and for whatever reason it's not even wireless so if she was ever going to see it she would still see it because there's a wire hanging down off the bottom also when he says now i thought it was going to be a real quick motion not yeah because i was like this is this is taking like a full 30 seconds to go up she definitely already had time to look up and look back you know what i thought they were going to do because they had these spotlights sweeping like blow it in her face yeah just shine the spotlights like you're looking in the crowd and then she can't see [ __ ] yeah o'connor addresses the president through the speaker microphone assuming there wasn't already a microphone in the truck as a precaution against this the president is brought up to speed and demands that they not pay any money to the terrorists because he's not an idiot he tells o'connor about the plywood paneling and it wouldn't surprise me if he just reached over to tear all the wiring out to set the bomb off on purpose despite asante the acting president calls o'connor and announces that the additional votes didn't break the tie and now it's up to him the acting president is a big baby and wants o'connor to tell him what to do this guy is infuriating but also this this conversation is infuriating because he literally just spoke to the president directly and the president said don't give them anything don't pay him don't don't give in to any demands and the vice president's like oh o'connor what am i gonna do now is the moment when you say oh by the way i just talked to the president he says don't give in to the demands instead he's like i don't know but instead he just says yeah i don't know it's a tough decision for you to make mr president but he also has feelings like if he's not but i mean like o'connor actually wants to pay the ransom yeah like we've established already so like if he's not gonna relay the information that the president of the united states who is commander-in-chief just told us not to do this if he's not gonna say that you would assume it's because he has differing feelings which he would express now instead but instead he's just like no i'm gonna i'm gonna force you to make this decision because you're the acting president and he says no i'm gonna give you five minutes to answer me or else and he hangs up and it's like or else what yeah or else what the hell does that mean if i if i don't call you in the next five minutes with an answer then you still have to give the answer it doesn't make sense i'm assuming that they're operating under like the same kind of rules for air force one in the movie air force one where the president is technically incapacitated as if he had had a illness and fainted or collapsed and is unable to give orders or in the the day reagan was shot yeah where it's like who's in charge now the president's unconscious in a hospital that's why i'm imagining the vp is being ignoring the president's like but he doesn't know what the president wants he doesn't even know that they have a line of communication open with the president oh i i mean i guess i just assumed he was made aware but yes it's never stated yeah and if it and if he was aware he'd be like what'd he say now suddenly the cia has set up an alternate plan to rescue the president and by alternate i mean only plan so far they have an agent sneaking up on linda in the crowd and an actress with a crying baby that someone volunteered to approach explosives with like an actual live baby that was a real baby i i was just i i was like i don't know what's happening they have a real baby i i like the concept of the plan of you know because i mean there's people that try to do this sort of trick on you in order to you know like mug you or something like that where they'll like throw a baby at you always that you drop your stuff and like they take it or whatever and and you know so it kind of like this concept for how they plan to distract her in order to take her out but they used a real baby yeah so there's two options here this baby is the child of the agent that works for the secret service and she's actually using her own child for her job or they convinced someone else to loan their baby to approach a person who's probably wearing a tnt vest and said yes shake my baby at that terrorist [Laughter] but uh apparently that was the plan they wanted to distract the terrorists with a live baby and then just dare her to set the bomb off then two agents grabbed linda from both sides and she claims to have pressed the button but she says i pressed it i pressed it and it does sound over the crowd like i'm pregnant yeah i thought she was trying to like garner sympathy or trying to get the crowd to be on her side like the police are roughing up a woman who's pregnant yeah like she's trying to just plead something yeah or or in some weird like old tradition of of uh with the phrasing of uh pleading your belly yeah which means you can't go to jail if you're pregnant but uh so now that's an old old term completing your belly i don't know that one piracy times like uh uh mary uh mary reed like that so she didn't so she wouldn't have to go to real prison yeah but for some reason the truck didn't explode uh because that's not what this button was for o'connor is obviously furious to learn of this secret plan that's happening without his approval uh and now it's nine o'clock they drag linda into o'connor's office and again she insists that she pressed the button but dietrich and his men are like she didn't have time to press the button it's like how long does it take to press a button she could have done it in her pocket she had it in her hand the whole time he announces that clearly this whole thing was just a hoax to embarrass the u.s and asante lasts and explains that the detonator is actually just starting a timer and that it doesn't blow the explosives but now the truck will explode ahead of schedule at midnight the same time it was supposed to explode before i i whenever when they cut when they first cut to the timer ticking i was like it's counting the wrong way yeah it's counting up it's just a clock it's a clock timer but it's like as soon as he said that he's like oh you just cost your president a few hours and it's like a few hours he was going to blow up at midnight and it's it's past nine now so it could not possibly a couple i think is the maximum a few know because a few is at least three and if it costs him three hours then he's already dead but the time didn't change so i don't understand what he's talking about i mean i guess if he got paid at midnight he would have extended the deadline to make his getaway he should have pushed this button this morning before they even got to the event yeah o'connor orders dietrich flown back to the u.s which he doesn't have the authority to do and uh he says unhandcuff asante and give him back his switchblade what why the one he's already used to kill one cop today the acting president authorizes the ransom payment which is exactly what his wife wanted to do before he told her to [ __ ] off [Music] at 10 o'clock o'connor walks asante and linda to their requested escape plane and he shows linda a picture of her dead sister with her throat slit not shot in the back as asanti described she assumes they are fakes and gets on the plane anyway asante checks out the diamonds on the plane he's very pleased o'connor tells asante now you have your stuff how do we open the truck and assante says oh good so you can shoot me down in essence begging o'connor to shoot him since he just abandoned all of his leverage the only the only reason we gave you these things so that you can let the president go if you're not gonna let the president go you don't get these things yeah that's the rule o'connor pulls out his gun and he hands it to linda instead of just shooting this guy no reason he would do this on any planet other than to make an interesting movie scene asante says that he will tell them how to unlock the truck a half an hour after takeoff when he seems to think that the plane's immunity to anti-aircraft weapons kicks in well that's what the purpose of the second plane was uh was to i guess have some kind of anti-radar it was a radar blocking type vehicle but you could still visually you could just follow that yeah you can still visually contact there's definitely other jets scrambled that are just waiting for them to take off so they can follow them asante approaches o'connor with a switchblade and now linda's starting to believe that maybe her sister's throat was slit o'connor announces that the revolutionary group that asanti claims to represent has denounced his actions and he calls that lies suddenly linda turns the gun on asante as visions of her sister's death play out in her head and she shoots him three times they're now in the same situation as if they'd shot asante nine hours ago except that now the president is in a truck with a bomb when before he was just outside also she knocks over all the diamonds and the sound of them just like falling to the floor was like ugh yeah that's going to be a pain in the ass for some intern yeah you got to find every single one the bomb will go off at midnight but it was going to go off at midnight all day no matter what linda has no idea how it works they plan to torch through underneath the truck because as they said it's two inches of steel and they probably didn't build in any kind of a precaution against that so it really bothers me that he handed her the gun when they're on the plane in the first place because he has no idea if she knows how the bomb works so the only reason he would give her the gun is because he thinks he can you know turn her against asante right but if he has no guarantee that anybody aside from this guy knows how to de-arm this truck why would he take that risk and if he was going to take that risk just shoot him yeah just shoot him right now he's made every wrong decision don't bother with this weird game he should be fired in half it's ridiculous the president peels back more snacks from the floor of the truck when he notices that the bottom of the truck is similarly wired to blow they move under the hood to try and take the engine out and cut through the firewall to get into the truck and they get the engine out with 10 minutes to spare right and they get the engine out without any sort of vibrations to set this off because i'm pretty sure without an impact wrench you're not getting any engine out of that thing nope and engines are notoriously light so there's no way that lifting it up would cause the car to raise jostle at all i guess they had to put weights on it to counteract like indiana jones style o'connor gets inside and wastes a full 30 seconds learning how to use bolt cutters 30 seconds of the president's last minute alive the truck explodes at midnight right on schedule and we wait a second to reveal that the president and o'connor had already made it out safely i was so infuriated when they showed them like i was like ah they're not gonna blow up the truck oh they are gonna blow up the truck ah they're not gonna be inside yeah uh scott talks to vice president richards on the phone and says hey you know i told you to resign just kidding i don't care that you tried to pay terrorists and diamonds to save me even though i specifically asked for that not to happen also whatever this international criminal thing that you were involved with yeah we'll weather this storm together the director here was george mendelach that's the end of the film by the way well but he also says to oh no so he says which one does he say to o'connor or the vice president he's like you did a really good job and i'm just like wait a minute you just got out of this truck like 30 seconds ago you haven't spoke to anybody about what he's done and he did the exact opposite of what you wanted him to do what do you mean you've done a good job yeah it doesn't make any sense um our director for this film was george mendoluck he directed meatballs three and a lot of tv stuff he actually directed a movie in 2017 called bitter harvest with barry pepper and terrence stamp so he's still working writer richard murphy wrote boomerang and the desert rats both of which earned him adapted and original screenplay oscar nominations respectively the novelist charles templeton also wrote a few episodes of tv but this was his last iodb credit for anything and i have to say that the original title of hostage is a much more apt title because he doesn't get kidnapped yeah he's here where he is yeah uh paul zazza uh we just had him doing the music for prom night he wrote all the sound likes uh and to replace all the expensive music in the in the first cut and it makes sense because most of the actual score to this film is just built on variations of hail to the chief it's just sound of likes of hail to the chat and they're all like like weird flat versions of the song i was like this is terrible yeah it was real bad william shatner was jerry o'connor he's captain kirk he also appeared on t.j hooker and boston legal in lead roles he played the titular dad on the series [ __ ] my dad says which was famously adapted from a popular twitter account he also played the lead role in a 1966 gothic horror film called incubus the second of only four films ever produced in the esperanto language though fluent speakers were quite disappointed with the pronunciation throughout hal holbrook was president adam scott he plays mark twain on stage he was deep throat and all the president's men he was george washington in john adams he played lincoln and carl sandberg's lincoln and lincoln in north and south the civil war mini-series he played francis preston blair in spielberg's lincoln he also played president maxwell monroe a second fictional president six years later in under siege van johnson was vice president ethan richards he was a big star for mgm during world war ii he played lieutenant merrick in the cane mutiny jeff douglas and brigadoon holly in battleground he had previously appeared with ava gardner in three men in white and two girls in a sailor movie titles used to be much simpler although two girls in a sailor is uncomfortably familiar two girls one sailor that's what they should accomplish oh god ava gardner played beth richards uh she was maxine falk in knight of the iguana lily langtry in the life and times of judge roy bean and remy royce graf in earthquake miguel fernandez was roberto asanti he played gregory bate in ghost story he also played khan in the escape yeah i'm a governor episode which is funny because uh william shatner plays kirk and this guy plays con [Music] cindy girling who is not mindy sterling played linda steiner she was windy in meatballs elizabeth shepherd was joan scott i don't know who joan scott was that's uh the president's wife oh okay uh that makes sense scott uh she plays joan hart not melissa joan hart in omen two damien and jane witherspoon in poltergeist the legacy maury chaikin was harvey cannon he played canuck the fake native american in nothing personal earlier this year he played jim sting in war games bert klein in twins and ernest in bartleby murray westgate was archie standler he played a gatekeeper and happy birthday to me next year sully boyar played the fbi chief he plays larry the dog catcher and knight of the juggler remember that i do they go to the pound with the information from the caller he'll be back as eddie gibbs and the jazz singer later this year patrick breimer was the jesus freak he's credited as jesus freak jackie burroughs played woman agent she was mrs styles in willard and vera smith in the dead zone fred franklin was herbert thurston he's credited as frederick franklin he played ashcroft in the fog earlier this year and mr gordon the grumpy hardware store owner in the hearse which is another crown international film michael kane played herb morris this is our fourth michael caine movie this year after the island dressed to kill and middle-aged crazy and he'll be back later this year for fooling around wait i'm sorry it's got to be a different michael caine there's two michael cants here okay uh michael caine with a c was in the island and dressed to kill and michael came with a k is in middle age crazy this and fooling around one of them's in the good movies uh paul larson played miller knee he was charlie thomas and altered states later this year he's blaster from beyond thunderdome no okay if you'll recall earlier this year we had master actor angelo rozito in galaxina where he hatched from an egg and became captain corny butt's child another in another crown international picture and he also appeared as an uncredited fruit vendor and can't stop the music the only other thing on his imdb is a tv movie that we won't be covering next year william marquez played kinsap he was the doctor in crazy heart and forever young he played eduardo in bedazzled the one with the mummy guy and he played frey felipe in the mask of zorro and lastly joseph ragno as saul that's the guy who quoted the vice president during the cabinet meeting he played willems in where the buffalo roam that's the prosecutor that was putting all the kids to jail he'll be back this year as first attorney in melvin and howard and he plays roy healey on marvel's jessica jones series for netflix this movie's not great i think it suffers from very little attention to detail uh it's just not well thought out yeah i mean it's it's well made uh and i i mean i i say that as in the production the production value is pretty good for a crown i think it's probably the best of the crown international pictures that we've seen i think galaxina was better well galaxina had had a lot more interesting things but you could see where it was a little sure that's true like i don't think this required much they secured a park correct like i would say the budgets are probably almost the same in the sense that they just could do a lot more when you don't have to create makeup and puppets and stuff like that uh but you know uh but performance wise other than hal holbrook who i feel like was he was great the big get for this he's the only believable person in this yeah and and how much of the movie did he really have to be in like how how many minutes did it take him to shoot those scenes yeah he could have been in and out in a day for sure yeah uh so uh you know obviously he was just like a good get for the movie and you know shatner was was adequately shatner in this movie this is between the star treks uh one and two so it wasn't like he was hard up for work or anything like that i mean he's he's a busy man uh but i guess maybe he felt like this was probably like a big just an opportunity to be more actiony which he really wasn't uh but yeah i i don't want to i don't i i weird i have a weird feeling about me i don't want to crap too hard on it because i don't feel like it deserves it i think it's just i think great it's based on a book though and this book wouldn't have been successful if it didn't fill in all the gaps there's a lot of plot holes in this and there's a lot of situations where you're like here's the obvious solution oh okay they're going to do that why'd they do that and we never explained why they did that and i i refuse to accept that that this author wrote a book where all these terrible decisions were made in a row and there's no explanation for it maybe it was wordy in the book well or maybe they had they had the problem of trying to make a lot of unseen things visual you know that we have a lot of internal monologue type stuff happening with the terrorists perhaps and we don't get any motivations in here yeah and you know things like she pulls out the the the button whereas like you don't have to pull it out in a book in the book you didn't have to pull it out but here we have to see that she has that because i think the concept of him being in an impenetrable box that's got a bomb right out in the view of public i mean there's there's a lot of interesting ideas to that yeah um but the problem is getting them into the box yeah for me exactly no exactly that whole handcuff sequence i was like that's pretty ridiculously risky even from when they have him outside of the truck and they're like yes put the president in your armored vehicle please it's like why would you say that you're not gaining anything by putting him in there he's still right next to a bomb so just keep him next to a bomb outside of the truck you can't get into this guy isn't threatening you like this very moment to blow him up per se like he's not like on the edge he's like no no stop screwing around i'm gonna push this button i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it and even like you said the president is not cooperating like he should have just been like no [ __ ] this guy like try and strangle him outside of the truck just strangle him right here if if your entire security detail was suddenly like you know what mr president maybe you should let this guy kill you i would be like okay well i guess i'm on my own now i'm just gonna try and strangle this guy because there's nothing else to do can we talk about the fact that the poster is these two hands one of which is holding a gun like the terrorist hand and the president's hand are handcuffed together and the terrorist hand is holding a gun and he doesn't use a gun this entire time that's true although he does point the he points the he points the controller button for the bomb as if it were a gun yeah but he but this guy doesn't use a gun the entire time the girlfriend does not only that but the button that he's holding doesn't actually activate anything well they don't know that yeah because we learned that over the course of the film yes we learned that once once the button's pressed yeah when the woman screams i'm not talking about her button i'm talking about he when he's loading the president into the truck he's like waving his button around and it's like you already pushed that button it blew up a thing over there that's true well there could be more than one button there could but there wasn't they could see the thing that he was holding had one switch on it and he already flipped it but they don't know that he detonated that bomb someone else could have detonated it i guess he said there was some but but he makes it seem like he doesn't have the trigger to this spawn he makes it very clear that someone else is in control of the bomb but also like you said it's not a dead man switch he's like it's really easy to stop someone from pressing a button yeah because his finger's not on it yeah like i know it's really easy to get on it but dead man switch is the whole concept is that when you die and you lose you like yeah you let go and even the woman in the in the crowd you have sharp shooters kill the woman in the crowd shoot her in the face you don't have to shake someone's baby at her just shoot her and then you're you're in the clear yeah and she has to go to the bathroom eventually like like she can't just stay there for six hours just run around giving everyone drinks just like hey let's just keep everyone uh refreshed yes they're really hydrated here's some stuff you in particular there's a bunch of drinks or just drugger there's so many solutions but or or do a random id check we're doing a random id check but there's so many scenes where they just misplay leverage where they're just like wait what he's doing doesn't actually serve a purpose and it doesn't help his situation at all and the other person has no leverage on him i don't know why they're complying with the demand here other than because the script requires this to happen yeah and whenever that happens i feel like the the writing is to blame but yeah what do you think letterboxed um do you want to do up or down up or down or is that pretty obvious just what do you think up or down it's a down definitely down yeah it's a down it's a down for me too letterboxed um i have this uh strangely up against some of the last ones we've been doing they've all been kind of falling around in the same spot um i actually have this just below hunter or the hunter and just above fiendish plot okay oh fu manchu okay it wasn't clear our finished plot uh mine's pretty low it is about 15 from the bottom it's right between uh it's right below the little dragons and right above effects uh mine is also exactly 15 from the bottom and also right above fiendish plot and below how to beat the high cost of living which puts three very long titles in a row how to beat the high cost of living the kidnapping of the president and the fiendish plot of dr fumanchu but um yeah i the writing bothered me it seemed like it wasn't really thought completely out and uh and hal holbrook was the only believable person in it everybody else is playing this like heightened caricature of like a tv villain yeah and he's the only person who's playing this like a human being that would be like what no don't do that yeah this movie felt very tv movie like it felt like you just cut out the throat slitting and there's really nothing in there that happens that couldn't have been on television i wonder if it wasn't a mini-series there's also some language i think someone says [ __ ] somewhere in the movie and when i was watching it i was like i was like oh maybe i guess this isn't a tv movie yeah but because somewhere the run time for this was originally like 3 14 or something like this but but right now the even on imdb it says the run time is whatever it is like just under two hours or an hour and 45 minutes but somewhere when i first made the list the run time was listed at 3 14 and i was like maybe this was like a three-part mini-series originally it feels very tv yeah but uh it wasn't great and also the first version of it that i got was square format but the one that you can watch for free on prime right now is 185 but it's actually an extraction of the four three version that i have oh that makes sense so i don't know if it was actually because i mean technically if you shot it on 35 millimeter it would be 4-3 on the film and some there's a lot of shots where it just looks empty on the top and the bottom in the 4-3 version so i was like maybe this they just like when they redid the transfer they accidentally did it at 4-3 instead of the 185 that it was presented in theaters but either way you know that other copy had a television distribution company logo at the front of it that's true the amazon one did not yeah i think that's everything for this one if you guys have any thoughts you'd like to share with us we're vintagevideopod on twitter facebook instagram and letterbox or as i've said before you can find each of our full movie rankings for the year we can also be found at vintagevideopodcast.com please consider reading us on itunes to help people find the show and if you take the time to leave us a review we will thank you personally in an upcoming episode if you're feeling especially generous you can also support the show through patreon.com vintage video podcast thank you so much for listening and i hope you'll join us next time when we'll be discussing smokey and the bandit 2 which imdb describes like so the bandit goes on another cross-country run transporting an elephant from florida to texas and once again sheriff buford t justice is on his tail we leave you now with the trailer for smokey and the bandit this too is sheriff of t justice i'm sure you all recall how i went after a fella by the cp name abandoned and almost lost my head daddy the top came off no some of you less respectable citizens may even snicker when you recall that i never caught that kick well i've got news for you the bandit is back now before you go getting all worked up about it let me reassure you people there ain't no way he's gonna make a fool out of pupity justice why didn't you have your gun loaded when i put bullets in it daddy it gets too heavy [Music] this time folks he's bitten off more than he can chew he's taking on a combo that proves he's gotten too big for his bridges oh in my life i can turn them on but i can't turn them along and if he thinks he can sneak two tons of pregnant pachyderm onto my he's got another thing coming ha ha now we've got him in the biggest baddest traffic ever cause this time i got help two of the most brief and respected low men on the road today my two brothers e lord and reggie well if i can keep and it don't matter where he goes it don't matter what it tries to pull my brothers [Music] don't let me down universal pictures presents earth reynolds jerry reed sally field dom de louise jackie gleason jackie gleason jackie grayson and charlotte in smokey and the bandit part two [Music] the movie that proves once again [Music] it's not what's in your truck good counts [Music] it's who's on your tail [Music]