User Reviews

"Gone in 60 Seconds" is easily one of the great car chase movies, and it works almost in spite of its inherent "rough" quality. The acting here is pretty low-rent, and the pacing (for the first half, that is) is probably on the sedate side for the modern audience. Me, I was in candyland with one shot after another of '70s muscle cars, not to mention the array of foreign sports (Panteras don't grow on trees). And the movie is distinctly of its time and place. Verrry '70s. Who can hate that? And there are several shots of panicked pedestrians during the final chase - and according to the trivia section, those weren't stunt people. Guerilla filmmaking, baby!

But then we get to the second half, which is all car chase. Forty god-loving minutes of car chase. So much wanton destruction, it borders on demolition derby. And it's not the modern cut-to-ribbons in the editing room, noisy, dizzying bonanza - it's a genuine let-it-build series of near-misses, clipped-fenders and t-bones that actually thrills and builds to a pretty cool jump. And that's not even the cool payoff that is the slick getaway in the final moments.

You can fault this movie for its pedestrian first half, but I can't think of any reason to hate the second. And even if you bought the film and just skipped to the car chase, "Gone in 60 Seconds" still earns its place.

7/10

(spoilers)?

This movie is pure fun. One of the few times where the lack of a storyline equals a good rating. Clearly though, I can't compare this movie with the 2000 movie of the same name. Though it has a couple of items in the 2000 , they are different movies. It's not a "remake" . It's more of an homage to. Both are better and worse in certain places.

On this movie, 1974.. our main character isn't a nice guy. But he's not a bad man. But he does steal cars and it isn't very glamorous.

I am a bit disappointed that they did not include a second disc with the original soundtrack to it. With the original special effects. (I'm talking about the 2001 dvd release)

7/10

Quality: 2/10 Entertainment 10/10 Replayable: 10/10

This is a very interesting movie for a lot of reasons -- it's a great car chase film for the drive-in crowd, and remarkably manages to create more vehicular devastation than bigger budget films like "The French Connection" and "Bullitt" (although I would note that this film is actually pretty expensive compared to many drive-in films). It's also something of an homage to films like "The Asphalt Jungle" with its modestly subversive focus on the mechanisms of the criminal element.

The first part of the movie is a bit slow granted, but compared to a lot of the newer auto-crash/race type movies it's somewhat welcome that the film allows the pace to build up somewhat. Let's not get carried away talking about characters and motivation and so forth -- about halfway through the movie I still couldn't tell who the main character was supposed to be. I don't think this is a defect in the movie, it's actually part of its self-conscious charm -- the producers of the film have only listed one star for the film: Eleanor, a 1973 Ford Mustang. Basically the plot is about a trio of kids who inherit their daddy's insurance business and use their savvy and information to become wholesale auto thieves. They get an order to deliver 48 cars in a 48 hour period and thus begins a mad spree that makes Corman and Howard's "Grand Theft Auto" look conservative.

Minimal sexual/exploitation value here -- it's probably best as a movie for car lovers, the type of movie you used to see all the time on "Lost Drive In" and shows of that type. It's notable that the movie's style is more of a throw-back to films as I say like "Asphalt Jungle" and "The Killing" -- instead of focusing on the kind of shenanigans that the so-called "biker" movies by AIP and CI from the late 60s this one is pretty much only concerned with allowing us to vicariously enjoy the element of theft and with its fascination with fine auto machinery. This gives it a refreshingly adult and even documentarian quality. Someone looking back a century from now wanting to see the great sports cars of the late 20th Century in action could do worse than to watch this movie.

One of the aspects of the film that gets a lot of attention is the extensive stunt driving, much of which was apparently done by the film's star/director H.B. Halicki, a famous auto collector who died while making one of his subsequent films. In this area the film certainly lives up to its reputation because it's hard to believe that people actually walked away from some of these stunts without some kind of permanent reminder. The car itself undergoes such an unbelievable beating that by the end you feel like you owe it some kind of respect regardless of how you feel about the movie, like Rocky and Apollo Creed after their big fight.

I think this is one of the drive-in films that will survive and be seen as a model of what can be done on a relatively small budget by people with a lot of passion and focus. It will never be considered a straight-up "classic" per se because the dialog is pretty awkward and there's a bit too much of it perhaps in the first half. But once the film really starts going it never slows down to let you think too much about the details, and it sure is a lot of pure fun.

GONE IN 60 SECONDS is a well-remembered car chase thriller of the 1970s. It was one of many films involving fast cars and races with the police, sequences that even made their way into mainstream films like the James Bond/Roger Moore movies for instance. People may remember that this film was made into a glossy version with Nic Cage in 2000, which has absolutely nothing to do with the original other than having the same title.

This film is quite low budget and for most of the running time it's very ordinary. The plot doesn't really go very far and there's little in the way of excitement or interest. Below average, in fact, and the poor acting merely compounds this. However, the film is well worth watching purely because of the car chase climax, which lasts no less than 40 minutes! 40 minutes of vehicular mayhem in which a Ford Mustang is chased through the streets by a whole array of police cars while endless destruction abounds. It's pure entertainment and spectacle and you never lose interest for a second. Great fun.