Two-Minute Warning

Charlton Heston, John Cassavetes, Martin Balsam, Beau Bridges. Fear and panic develop as a lone gunman sets his sights on a sellout crowd at a championship football game. 1976/color/120 min/R/widescreen.

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. 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. 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. 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. Unfairly dismissed by a number of critics, Two Minute Warning is an absorbing contemplation of the phenomenon of violence. 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. --Tom Keogh 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.