"Against all Odds" is a 1974 moody remake of the noir classic "Out of the Past" and ultimately less successful. This time around, it's not Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer (though Greer appears in this films as the owner of a football team) but Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward. The film also stars James Woods, Alex Karras, Swoozie Kurtz and Richard Widmark. Ward plays Greer's daughter, who runs away from her boyfriend (Woods). When Bridges is cut from the football team, bookie Wood hires him to find his girlfriend. Trouble follows.
Somewhere post-Thornbirds, the beautiful Ward started playing bad girls. Here she's not so much bad, as Greer's character was in the original, but more of a brat and an ingrate. Totally unlikable. The cast is very good, but too much to type so that there were no surprises in the story. Ward usually plays a user, Woods someone snarky, Widmark bad guys, Greer cold as ice. So after meeting everyone, it wasn't hard to figure out that Bridges was asking for trouble. Oh, and did I mention that Saul Rubinek often plays slime and Pat Corley is usually a crooked politician? It was almost paint by numbers.
Despite some beautiful scenery, some good scenes and good acting, Against All Odds left me disappointed. The plot, as in Out of the Past, is a little convoluted, which would be okay if, at the end, you cared. I didn't.
