Two-Minute Warning [DVD]

ISBN 10: 0783230419 ISBN 13: 9780783230412

Publisher: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 1992

A nightmare of fear and panic unfolds in this chilling tale of a lone gunman who sets his sights on a sell-out crowd at a championship football game. Charlton Heston is the police captain who leads the desperate fight to stop the madman - high atop the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum - before he sets off widespread devastation in the jam-packed stadium. John Cassavetes and Martin Balsam are among those risking their lives to thwart the sniper's attempts, while innocent spectators Gena Rowlands, Jack Klugman, Beau Bridges, Walter Pidgeon, David Janssen and thousands of others try to hide from the fatal gun sites and avoid the deadly ensuing stampede.

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Review

Unfairly dismissed by a number of critics, Two Minute Warning is an absorbing contemplation of the phenomenon of violence. Based on a novel by George LaFountaine, the story concerns an anonymous (and, until the very end, faceless) sniper perched above the scoreboard at a championship football game in Los Angeles. His lack of identity and unstated motivation is key to the film's air of cautionary fable, in which the killer's rage is one end of a continuum that includes many different kinds of violence among numerous characters: emotional withdrawal, police brutality, subtle racism, chips on various shoulders. Produced in 1976, the movie has all the hallmarks of the decade's vogue for disaster flicks: an ensemble cast, a web of story lines, and a lot of people contained in one place where something awful happens. But it is also something more: a successful exercise in plastic storytelling, a clever interweaving of a dozen discrete subplots with a mix of documentary and original action footage. The explosiveness of the football game itself becomes a refrain of ritualized mayhem in director Larry Peerce's patchwork film, but without beating us over the head with its metaphorical obviousness. Two Minute Warning may not be a great or classic work, but it is far more than the sum of its many parts and does leave a lasting impression. --Tom Keogh

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