Two-Minute Warning (1976)

Two-Minute Warning kinda sucks. First and foremost this is a disaster film, in the vein of The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and less well-known gems such as Earthquake and The Hindenburg. In other words, this film has a million characters, and its first act introduces them all while we ready ourselves for the impending disaster, which must arrive with finality and force in act three. 

This movie is about a psychopathic shooter who decides to murder a bunch of people at a football game at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. One of the virtues with disaster films is that they are good at character. But in this movie only a few of the characters are interesting, unfortunately, and so I was more interested in the psycho shooter than almost anyone else.

Perhaps the strangest part of Two-Minute Warning is Charlton Heston's performance. Heston, who only 8 years earlier had been a sex symbol, is, in this film, an out-of-shape policeman who is actively bad at his job. In fact, Heston plays a character whose ego gets at least a dozen people killed. What's even weirder is that the film doesn't really his bad decisions as responsible. (It is, of course, the shooter's fault that people died and not the policeman's fault, but his ego sure makes the whole thing run more smoothly for the psychopath.)

Anyway, this just isn't interesting. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands are both good. I liked David Janssen too (I usually do), and Beau Bridges. But – here's an example of how this filmmaker just sort of lost the plot – Joe Kapp is completely wasted in this. He's in the first act, in which he is introduced as one of the characters in the disaster movie. He's the quarterback of one of the football teams. But once he's on the field, the film literally never, not once goes back to him. So he's introduced for no reason at all, and this also means that Two-Minute Warning has zero characters who are actually playing the game. It's kind of a huge mess.