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Reviews10
rmlattimore's rating
Not a false moment in the movie. Well acted by everyone in the cast. Great script, great story and lines. You're drawn to Tom Hardy's character (clearly channeling Mike Tyson in his ring persona) but Joel Edgerton is extremely skilled in portraying a high school physics teacher who returns to MMA. Edgerton totally sells his character because his character faces the bigger challenges and he is totally believable. Frank Grillo, who plays his trainer, is outstanding in a supporting role. The best scenes are between Hardy and Nick Nolte and are 100 percent believable. Amazingly acted. And all of it is to the credit of the director. There have been grander movies, more ambitious movies, but none better executed. I own a copy of the movie and I am writing this watching it on broadcast TV. It is that good. If you haven't seen it, watch it, you won't regret it.
but if that's what you want to see, you'd watch that instead of this. What Blue Thunder is, is a very well-done action movie. The plot is thin, a contrivance in order to pit Roy Scheider against Malcolm McDowell. McDowell, really, only lacks a mustache to twirl and a cape. (As someone else said, really, why WASN'T he ever a Bond villain? He'd have been much better than Jonathan Pryce or Christopher Walken, both fine actors miscast in their Bond bad-guy roles. He could have been a Bond bad-guy with THIS role.) The movie never drags. In the context of suspension of reality necessary for movies, the plot never makes you go, oh come on. You hiss McDowell, you root for Scheider. The ending is fairly predictable but no less satisfying. This movie was roaring good fun back in the 80s and it holds up now.
Performances in this movie were top notch. Others have praised Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Derek Luke and others; I'll draw your attention to Julius Tennon, who played the coach of Dallas-Carter. He's pretty much the villain here, and he is _perfect_ in his role. He gives a performance that should have been up for a Supporting Actor Academy Award, if the Academy actually honored supporting actors (like, for instance, Dame Judy Dench in Shakespeare in Love; probably the last time an actor with an incidental role will be so honored) instead of second leads. The sideline scenes in FNL are all so well done, and you can see the chess match taking place in the minds of the coaches, particularly when one coach has all the pieces. I can't think of a better football movie that I've seen. I prefer it to Remember the Titans and North Dallas Forty, among those that come to mind.