Jailbreakers

This kind of reminds me of the Masters of Horror series, the series of short films made for Showtime in the early 2000s, hyping up the talents of filmmakers like John Carpenter and Joe Dante which ended up being largely just an uneven series of random horror-like stories without any real authorial stamps from the talents involved. I guess Showtime's been doing this for a while because Jailbreakers is part of a series called Rebel Highway, and this kind of just feels like a generic 50s biker film homage with Friedkin behind the camera. I mean, this isn't terrible or anything, but it feels like a quick afterthought of a script out of a bunch.

In the 1950s, Tony Falcon (Antonio Sabato Jr.) is a ne'er-do-well out of high school greaser with some friends still going to school, most notably Skinny (Adrien Brody). One day while meeting them outside the building, they watch the school's cheerleaders practice, and Tony leers over Angel Norton (Shannen Doherty) who gets a thrill out of the attention and likes being the object of affection for such a bad boy. They start a relationship. He's increasingly violent to other people. She's excited by the whole thing. He robs a burger joint, and they get arrested, her getting off of any charges and him going straight to prison.

I mean...this is really generic stuff. I guess the only thing that really separates it from the stuff actually being made in the 1950s is the preponderance of foul language and the implied oral sex that Tony gives to Angel as she drives the car which seems...difficult? Kids are so cray-cray, you know? It's all presented in Friedkin's clear-eyed visual style with an emphasis on performance, and this is one of those films where you see the limits of how far performance can take a film. Everyone here is good, from Doherty at the center of everything to Sabato playing up the tough-guy image to Adrienne Barbeau as Angel's mother all worried and trying to restart her family's life after the disruption of Angel's arrest to Brody who feels like he probably should have been the protagonist of the whole thing by the end. However, the story is so...unremarkable without any of real substance to say. Is it about how the 1950s were intolerant of criminal behavior and used social shunning? Terrible, I know.

That shunning manifests in Angel losing her part in the school production of Romeo and Juliet to her father losing clients to her mother being snubbed at parties, so they completely move to a new city while Tony remains in jail, pining for the girl who won't write to him. She, in the meantime, gets close to Jack (Chris Conrad), a jock, while still harboring feelings for Tony in prison to the point where she writes to him finally, setting off the series of events that leads to the eponymous jailbreak and a speedy chase towards the Mexican border. Three groups end up chasing them, Angel's parents, the police, and...Skinny leading Angel's former little gang of biker greasers.

Skinny taking part feels so random, but the ending revolves around him being the good guy in a bad situation. This also follows up from him helping Tony steal a horse and sell it as their own between the jailbreak and getting Angel. The whole Skinny thing is probably where the film could have been interesting and where most of the confusion thematically and narratively lies. It's not that it's confusing about what's happening, but confusion on the part of the film about what the film is actually trying to be about at its core. Really, this is a first draft.

So...it's fine. It's far from good, but the generic parts are handled well enough while the acting is all actually pretty good. It's just that where it could have been interesting, it's not, and where it's generic, it's nothing particularly special.

Really, this feels like Friedkin just cashing a quick paycheck between projects.

This is a film which targets teenagers. It has a young cast and its plot is not that important. But it tackles the story of a young beautiful and gorgeous girl who sets young men up in order to get the attention she needs and it turns out to be that she's the victim. I see the scenario is not a big deal. However it entertains teens. I was attracted to sean whalen, shannen doherty and adrian brody who was by then an ordinary actor not the star who has emerged from the pianist. I guess that's the view of a large number of people. I like the leather clad characters. But the way the movie ends is kinda trivial.

The plot of this film adaptation is similar to other films from "Rebel Highway" list and does not differ in any originality. There is a cheerleader in the person of Shannen Doherty - a girl with a changeable mood, who in a couple of seconds falls in love with an ambiguous element riding a bike. As usual, they then get into various troubles together, as a result of which the latter quickly goes to prison, but, however, not for long. Bored, as they sang in the song of Yegor Letov, from the unbearable ease of being, the heroine gradually forgets about her casual romance and switches to another guy who does not stand out for his extreme behavior. The idyll does not last long - the biker escapes from prison with a firm intention to return his favorite passion, along the way throwing one of his colleagues on a high-budget deal. After meeting the aforementioned, they head off to Mexico together in a newly purchased Chevrolet convertible, further complicating their situation along the way, as a result of which both heroes will regret more than once that they got involved with each other. The police, the girl's parents, and former friends from a small gang set off in pursuit of them. The outcome of their wanderings becomes quite predictable.

It turned out to be difficult to establish for sure what acted as the ideological inspirer from this position, but I dare to assume that this film was "The Delinquents" of 1957.

Jailbreakers (1994)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Who would have ever thought that the director of THE EXORCIST and the co-writer of HALLOWEEN could come up with something this poor? High school cheerleader Angel (Shannen Doherty) has a great life in front of her but she ends up falling for Tony (Antonio Sabato, Jr.), a rebel lowlife who slowly but surely brings her down to his level and before long the two are trying to evade the police. This was another one of those in-name-only remakes of the older AIP flick. This one here has Debra Hill co-writing the screenplay as well as producing and we've got William Friedkin directing but you really wouldn't know it just by watching this film. Friedkin's direction can not be spotted as it appears he was either very bored with this production and didn't care about it or perhaps we could give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wanted to pay homage to all those bad "C" movies from AIP. If his goal was to make a bad movie just like people would have seen back in the 1950s then I guess you can call this a success. The biggest problem is that there's simply no energy in the film and even at just 76-minutes the thing feels way too long. Another problem is the screenplay, which just seems to jump around in time as there's really no character development and there are so many things that just seem to happen for no reason. Both Doherty and Sabato, Jr. actually do decent jobs with their roles and there's even a young Adrien Brody playing one of the sidekicks. Adrienne Barbeau plays the girl's mother but she's pretty much wasted and spends most of the film just standing around. JAILBREAKERS really doesn't have much going for it so only those who need to see all the films in the series should bother with it.

I found this episode to be extremely well executed, which is expected since William Friedkin is at the helm. I saw it a while ago on television and i hated it, but now just watched it again on netflix and it's a well made little Friedkin film such as many of other episodes he's done for television (Twilight Zone, Tales from the Cript, and CSI). The film was well photographed, edited, acted and directed. It does carry his theme of the thin line between good and evil.

I would say it's a great teenage film. I can't believe Adrian Brodi was in this film as a teenager who went on to have a great career in films and winning an Oscar. Shannen Doherty...well I'm not sure what happened to her. William Friedkin went on to make some decent films (Rules of Engagement, The Hunted, Bug, Killer Joe), but Jade, well that's a different story.