This is an enjoyable but massively over long Thriller dealing with the attempts of Palestine supporting terrorists to create panic at the Super Bowl over there during over the United States involvement in supporting Israel. That's a combination of thrills for sports fans and for fans of complex political thrillers, taking director John Frankenheimer back down the territory of mind control that he first showed in "The Manchurian Candidate", which was ironically out of circulation at the time. It's an ironic emphasis on the lyric of the bombs bursting in air during the Star-Spangled Banner as the Goodyear blimp above Miami prepares to make its flight over the stadium. The mind control has obviously work on a suicidal Vietnam War veteran played by Bruce Dern, and others involved in the plot, including Martha Keller and Robert Shaw, have their own agendas.
It takes nearly two hours for them to get to the actual Super Bowl sequence, but there is plenty of action on the way as well as Carnage, with Keller quite the adept assassin, at one point posing as a nurse and killing a security guard to get to a hospitalized target. You get to know these characters I've been personally too, and certainly while you routed them to fail, the sympathy towards their cards isn't completely missing even though it has evil intentions. This isn't your typical disaster flick (a genres that was slowly decreasing in popularity at the time), but one that utilized real world politics as part of its plot development.
The film becomes more nail biting as it reaches its climax, and it's pretty obvious that somehow the mission is going to fail, but just how becomes the Intriguing elements. This is a high-budget thriller well written and well-made, although I could have easily seen a good 20 minutes trimmed off of it. Keller is the most sinister of the three, dispatching her victims simply as if she was throwing out a Big Mac container. There's also an appearance by President Carter, seeing arriving at the Super Bowl, giving an even bigger political agenda, just like the film "Hennesy" had done years ago with the sequence of terrorist Rod Steiger in Westchester Abbey in London with the queen present. It takes a little patience to stick with this during the slow points, but ultimately it all worked out as an engaging, exciting thriller.
It takes nearly two hours for them to get to the actual Super Bowl sequence, but there is plenty of action on the way as well as Carnage, with Keller quite the adept assassin, at one point posing as a nurse and killing a security guard to get to a hospitalized target. You get to know these characters I've been personally too, and certainly while you routed them to fail, the sympathy towards their cards isn't completely missing even though it has evil intentions. This isn't your typical disaster flick (a genres that was slowly decreasing in popularity at the time), but one that utilized real world politics as part of its plot development.
The film becomes more nail biting as it reaches its climax, and it's pretty obvious that somehow the mission is going to fail, but just how becomes the Intriguing elements. This is a high-budget thriller well written and well-made, although I could have easily seen a good 20 minutes trimmed off of it. Keller is the most sinister of the three, dispatching her victims simply as if she was throwing out a Big Mac container. There's also an appearance by President Carter, seeing arriving at the Super Bowl, giving an even bigger political agenda, just like the film "Hennesy" had done years ago with the sequence of terrorist Rod Steiger in Westchester Abbey in London with the queen present. It takes a little patience to stick with this during the slow points, but ultimately it all worked out as an engaging, exciting thriller.