Firepower

Director Michael Winner was a very consistent director. His movies were almost always bad. Winner had a lazy style that always bothered me. He just seems to place his camera with very little thought. Getting good performances form his usually strong cast doesn't seem to concern him either. Winner's "Firepower" checks all of those boxes. "Firepower" has a good cast but it's none of their finest hours. The standout being a dreamy Sophia Loren. Loren has seldom looked better. The action is well staged, for the most part, but it's also boring. The tropical locations are nice and I'm sure the cast had a great time at whatever resort they were staying at. As far as "Firepower" goes, it's a borderline camp classic.

Jerry Fanon (James Coburn) is a nice mercenary....sort of a James Bond up for hire. The US government hires him to locate and bring a mob boss, Stegner, back to pay for his crimes. But Stegner is in the Caribbean and extraditing him isn't possible. So, with his buddy, Catlett (O. J. Simpson), the pair make their way to there. However, almost no one knows WHAT Stegner looks like and Fanon wants to kill two stones...to capture Stegner AND to bring back a mob widow (Sophia Loren) who appears to be a prisoner of Stegner and his goons.

In some ways, this plays like a James Bond film but with LOTS more explosions and killing. Realistic? No way...but nice mindless adventure...especially the steam shovel bit. My only complaint is there the end...when all sorts of vehicles blow up and WHY is never explained. Why would one of the baddies keep blowing up cars with his goons inside. This really made no sense and it's almost like a piece of the story is missing....the WHY.

Forgettable time-waster, without purpose or meaning. It proves that even a few wild car chases and large-scale explosions can't sustain a desperately uninteresting and uninvolving story. The large cast is largely underused. (*1/2)

Sophia Loren sees her husband's chemist lab blown to smithereens with him inside; turns out he was murdered after threatening to expose a case of contaminated pharmaceuticals that cause cancer to anyone taking them. She goes to the FBI, whose top operative hopes to lure bounty hunter/hit man James Coburn out of retirement to bring in a reclusive, crooked billionaire, while Sophia wants him to help avenge her husband's death; she may also have known Coburn intimately at one time...or is that his twin brother she once romanced? Director Michael Winner isn't very adept at working with actors, and yet at this point in his career he became very popular with past-their-prime talents still looking to make a buck. Nobody involved in "Firepower" comes off looking good, particularly a bloat-bellied Coburn. Busy film jets across the globe in search of new plot points, but all of its action is stodgy or stilted. Too bad, this cast in these exotic locations might have made for a delicious, tawdry action-flick. Unfortunately, Winner (who also co-originated the story) doesn't have a sense of his own absurdity, and shows a robotic sense of humor. *1/2 from ****

Michael Winner's films aren't complete without a lot of blood, and this one has enough to fill a bucket or two.

James Coburn is the retired hitman who comes back in to kidnap a certain Karl Stegner, a mysterious and very wealthy man wanted by the IRS and various other federal agencies.

Coburn teams up mainly with OJ Simpson, with some dubious assistance from Sophia Loren, and we have a 70s high-tech sort of caper. Lots of gadgetry, most of it explosive, large quantities of double-crossing and shooting, plenty of pretty shots of the Caribbean from floating gin palaces, and a plot of such ludicrous over-complexity that it's silly.

It was obviously immense fun to make: several very large houses get burned down, bulldozed and otherwise trashed. As do various means of transportation. With lots of explosions and shooting.

It's implausible and it's almost impossible to understand why anyone would do what these people do, but apparently this is what they do. Bullets fly and things blow up.

There is an awful lot of frenetic activity, constantly accompanied by the sound of gunfire with regular scenes of conflagration.

Did I mention that there's a lot of shooting and explosions in this? In case I didn't, there is, as well as a very confusing plot.

It's not a very good movie.