La cavale impossible

Thankfully this moves along at a quick pace! Otherwise you might be forced to notice that the plot stinks, dialog is just terrible, and there's basically no point to making, let alone watching this film!

Things start out fine with a bombastic courtroom shootout, with a stack of bodies and gallons of blood. However, during the chaos, two other lesser criminals (O'Neal and Cara) somehow end up on the lam through the underside of the city.That's pretty much the plot. Throw in the twist (no spoiler): Cara is the suburbanite daughter of a doctor, and O'Neal is the tough street kid from the ghetto. (That's hardly noticeable these days, but probably raised one or two eyebrows back then!)

The film moves along from one absolutely stupid or unrealistic scene to the next. Side characters are thin and just ridiculous. Hard to tell who wins the acting award here... I noticed at least one other review here ripping on Cara and praising O'Neal; well, I beg to differ! Either O'Neal just can't deliver bad lines with a crappy director, or she's a terrible actor. Cara, meanwhile, seemed to be perfectly fine throughout (despite some terrible lines).

Go figure.

Watch it if you have a gut full of really bad beer and are bored out of your skull. Or not, and save what few brain cells you have left for something more engaging.

You can just imagine how they tried to sell this one. Two Oscar winners Tatum O'Neal and Irene Cara team up together in this very trashy, b-grade urban action-thriller exploitation; a modernized mould of "THE DEFIANT ONES".

After a full-on, adrenaline-fueled first half-hour of courthouse slaughter, bullets spray the screen, panic erupts and bloody exchanges occur. Escaping that frenzy the girls end up in the city's sewers fighting the underground elements, running from the authorities who want their blood and getting on each other's nerves, as sparks fly between two prisoners that couldn't be any more different in all walks of life. On the run they go, trying to survive, being wrongly fingered as accomplices to what went down. One costly mishap after another puts both in dangerous predicaments on the dirty side of town.

I thought this was going to be great; formulaic, yeah, but what an excessive opening with strong stunt-work. Instead by the time it hit the halfway mark, it had already peaked. There it becomes uneven, the tension from then onwards (other than the crackhouse fight) had little impact as scenes go on longer than they should and eventually it meandered to the (lousy) finish line. Sometimes it wanted to have its cake and eat it too, dipping into both half-baked exploitation and serious drama. The latter does get manipulatively cheesy by trying to strike up an emotional chord; like the (unnecessary) scenes with one of the girl's father (Cara). Even the low-brow dialogues make it hard to take seriously. Although I did like the combination between O'Neal and Cara, even though the character details are predictably wear-worn, yet their interactions engage, from the callous remarks/or actions to their growing bond. Both stars weren't afraid to get down and dirty, but while not particularly likeable O'Neal did standout in her hardened, street smart hooker turn. Someone who didn't is a paycheck collecting Peter Fonda who appears in one of the most ridiculously unconvincing staged moments in the film involving a nail-filer.

"What a feeling..." Irene Cara must have thought. "Just a few years ago I was performing and winning Oscars for acclaimed musicals like "Fame" and "Flashdance", and now I'm undressing myself and racing through sewers in a cheap & sleazy exploitation B-movie!". "Tell me about it..." could have been the reply by Tatum O'Neal. "...Ten years ago, I had world at my feet for winning an Oscar as a 10-year-old in "Paper Moon". Now I'm depicting a street prostitute with a foul mouth in a cheap & sleazy exploitation B-movie."

Well, there's one advantage. People like me have zero interest in watching movies like "Flashdance" or "Paper Moon", but I am on a mission to watch as many cheapy and sleazy exploitation B-movies from the 80s as much as humanly possible! The starring of the two leading ladies with a slightly more glamourous background, plus a brief appearance by the charismatic Peter Fonda, make "Certain Fury" a curious must-see oddity for the fans.

What several other reviewers already stated is truthful. "Certain Fury" is a solid and vastly entertaining actioner; - or at least for a while. It's a story about two girls on the lam. They understandably panicked, following a brutal and unforeseeable incident in court, but now they're considered as hardened criminals and there isn't a way back. The first half hour is fantastic, and I genuinely thought I had stumbled upon one of the roughest and most violent flick since "Chained Heat" and "Escape from New York". The extended opening sequences in the courtroom and the subsequent escape through the dangerous sewers are top-notch entertainment. It's grim, bloody, relentless, and fast-moving. Loved it.

The whole concept collapses like a feeble house of cards shortly after that, however. A slowdown of pace was inevitable, I guess, but "Certain Fury" turns into a dull, melodramatic, and whiny mess instead. The girls seek refuge in the apartment of an abuse boyfriend/pimp, escape via numerous rooftops, end up in a massive drug house, etc. Oh yeah, they also become BFFs along the way, of course. The performances of both Cara and O'Neal are admirable, and Stephen Gyllenhaal (later responsible for the excellent "Paris Trout") is clearly a gifted director, but the script is full of really bad dialogues and unevenness. Watch it until after the sewer gas incident, and you've got yourself 20 minutes of genuine, unhinged exploitation.

"Certain Fury" is grade-Z stuff in most departments (the low production values and the often very bad dialogue stand out), but Tatum O'Neal is engagingly tough and she makes the film worth watching all by herself. Irene Cara is awful, and the slashing scene is hilariously fake, but Tatum won me over, enough to give this film a ** rating.

Badly acted, written, and directed, Certain Fury provides a fair amount of unintentional laughs. Tatum is the 'bad' girl, Irene the 'good' girl gone bad. One of the funniest scenes had Tatum spitting in Peter Fonda's face. He responds by slashing her face (in unconvincing close-up) with his nail file. When she falls to the ground screaming, he blurts out to his hench-men, "Get this bleeding bitch off my boat!" If you like 'good bad films' then this one is for you. If you prefer quality...well then you've been warned.