A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

A Masterpiece!

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An exciting final two minutes to be sure. Unfortunately you must sit through nearly two hours of absolute boredom to get there. A crazed sniper perches atop the time clock at the LA Coliseum during a football game. He scopes out various audience members while cop Charlton Heston and SWAT commander John Cassavetes figure out what to do. There's zero suspense until the film's final moments when gunfire begins. The stars populating the under-developed story lines include Jack Klugman, David Janssen, Beau Bridges and Walter Pidgeon. Director Larry Peerce shows little flair for suspense despite having directed the dynamite NYC transit thriller THE INCIDENT ten years prior. Heston grits his teeth, barks "damn" and "bastard" a few times while Cassavettes looks bored senseless. Gena Rowlands, Marilyn Hassett and Martin Balsam are in it too and there are lots of ariel shots from the Good Year blimp.

A tightly plotted group jeopardy picture featuring a mad sniper at a packed Los Angeles football stadium. This features Charlton Heston as the cop in charge and a fantastic supporting cameo from John Cassavetes as Sergeant Chris Button who leads the S.W.A.T team tasked with taking down the gunman. Also notable for use of grainy TV footage imagery of the gunman being transmitted from the Blimp covering the football game which was eerily reminiscent at the time (76) of the infamous TV coverage of the Munich Olympics hostage situation. Fantastic climax and the scenes of crowd panic at the end are brilliantly and believably executed - reminding the viewer that mass casualties in such a situation would just as likely be caused by the crowd's panicked reaction to being attacked rather than the attack itself. An overlooked gem.

Two-Minute Warning is a typically sprawling 1970s disaster flick that is decidedly untypical in its explosive brutality and cold remorselessness. It's like a fusion of The Towering Inferno and the original Assault on Precinct 13 or The Poseidon Adventure and the original The Last House on the Left. Death and destruction are a staple of the genre, but I'm not sure any other disaster film of its era presented the audience with such shocking and disconcerting carnage.The story is set in what is clearly meant to be the Super Bowl but is referred to as "Championship Ten", and we're introduced to a large cast of characters at the big game. There's Charlie Tyler (Joe Kapp), the aging quarterback looking for one last moment of glory. There's Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam), head of the stadium where everything happens. Steve and Janet (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands) are a pair of squabbling, middle aged cohabitators who've flown into Los Angeles to watch their hometown team try and win it all. Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) is a man out of work who's taking his family to the game to try and forget all his troubles. An old pickpocket (Walter Pidgeon) and his pretty, young partner (Julie Bridges) show up at the stadium to steal as much as they can. An inveterate gambler (Jack Klugman) who has literally bet his life on the outcome of the championship winds up sitting next to a priest (Mitch Ryan) who's an old friend of Charlie Tyler. A beautiful woman (Marilyn Hassett) who got lassoed into attending the game winds up sitting next to a charming stranger (David Groh). And then there's police captain Peter Holly (Charlton Heston) and SWAT sergeant Button (John Cassavetes), two men who have to overcome their mutual distrust and resentment to try and keep everyone alive.That's because there's one more person at "Championship Ten" who really shouldn't be there. He's a deranged sniper with a high-powered rifle. This man (Warren Miller) is a mystery. It 's never clear why he's there or what he wants, only that he could unleash murder, panic and mayhem at any moment.In one way, Two-Minute Warning is like every other disaster flick. I t establishes who all of its characters are and then flits back and forth between them, giving us a bit more of their individual stories as it does. There's nothing unusual about any of it, though it's done reasonably well.In two ways, however, this film is unlike any disaster movie I think I've ever seen.First, the build up to the disaster is stretched out to the breaking point. I n other films like this, the big event (fire, earthquake, etc.) happens in the first half of the story or at least by the middle. Everything after that is the characters having to deal with the crisis and overcome various deadly challenges. Two-Minute Warning takes that pacing and throws it out the window. For a long time, the audience are the only ones to know the sniper is in the stadium. When he's finally discovered by an errant TV camera, the tension just keeps building as the authorities try to figure out what to do and then move into position to do it. The disaster here happens almost at the very end of the movie. But trust me, it's more than worth the wait.Second, there's a viciousness to this catastrophe epic that is unlike the rest of the genre. People get killed in those films, but not like they get killed here. People are trapped in helpless situations, but not as unsettlingly helpless as they are here. There's a whiff of horror to the last 15 minutes of so of this movie that is starkly different from the uplifting conclusions disaster flicks normally strive to deliver.From what I gather, Two-Minute Warning was a box office bomb when it was released. The movie-going public of 1976 apparently didn't find mass murder at the Super Bowl an appealing concept. That's a shame, because there's some gripping, nerve-wracking cinema on display here. It's hard and sharp and well worth watching.

In more ways than one, "Two-Minute Warning" is very reminiscent to that other 70's movie "Rollercoaster". They're both quite obscure in spite of the famous names involved, they both qualify as paranoid disaster movies and they both could and should have done more with their potentially brilliant basic plot outlines. I use the terms paranoid thriller and disaster movie to describe these films because they are mixtures of both. In paranoid thrillers a psychopath usually selects random innocent targets to agonize and in disaster movies large masses of people suddenly find themselves trapped or in great inescapable danger. "Two- Minute Warning" is a nearly perfect amalgam, with its premise of a lone sniper – whose motivations and even his face remain unknown throughout the film – hiding in the scoreboard tower of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during the football championship finale; when the stadium is at its full 91.000 maximum capacity. His motivations may be unknown, but the stone cold and brutal opening sequence, in which the shooter target- practices against an innocent man on a bicycle already manifested that he's merciless and extremely dangerous. When a TV-camera spots the sniper in his hideout, a large-scaled police operation unfolds behinds the scenes of the ongoing football game, with police Captain Peter Holly (Charlton Heston) preferring to wait and SWAT commander Burton (John Cassavetes) insisting on prompt action. Overall, I would say that the suggestive power and ideas behind "Two- Minute Warning" are far more disturbing and nightmarish than the actual execution. But perhaps it's also better this way, because the actuality of the subject could still cause large-scaled mass hysteria even nowadays. Strictly talking in terms of cinematic value, "Two-Minute Warning" nevertheless benefices from a very powerful first half hour and an astonishingly tense climax. Apart from the aforementioned target practice sequence, the opening contains many more sequences that literally ooze with suspense. For example the scenes in which the sniper observes the crowd through the telescopic lens of his rifle, and occasionally stops to zoom in on a potential victim, are literally nerve-wrecking. The POV camera angle increases the intensity and this sniper just happens to be crazy enough to shoot anyone, and thus the level of tension remains quite high. The finale, last 15 to 20 minutes or so, are sheer disaster movie genius, with devastating images of chaotic escaping attempts and unsettling footage of people getting overrun on their turbulent journey to the emergency exits. These massively staged sequences obviously aren't pleasant to look at, but you simply have to admire any film that mobilized such large crowds of people. The middle section is slightly overlong and drags in places, as it particularly focuses on the police interactions and the slightly more detailed introduction of a handful of football fans in the stadium. The script focuses on certain people, like a bickering elderly couple, a family of four, a man with huge gambling debts and a woman openly flirting with the man in the seat next to her, but we don't really get to know them. These short interludes might have worked very effectively in the novel ("Two-Minute Warning" adapted from a novel by George La Fontaine Sr.) but in a film they merely just serve to fill up some time. The violence, like the impact of the rifle shots, is quite harsh and shocking. The acting performances are decent but certainly not outstanding, with routine roles for disaster movie veteran Charlton Heston ("Earthquake", "Skyjacked"…), Martin Balsam ("Psycho"), Beau Bridges, David Janssen and Jack Klugman. Recommended, in a double- feature with the aforementioned "Rollercoaster" perhaps, but for genuine disaster movies check out "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure" and for genuine paranoid thrillers check out the first "Dirty Harry" (also with a sniper).