Course à mort : l'ultime solution

...in a vehicle with no headlights.

Here's the story. In a future time when the government won't let you own private modes of transportation, a former race car driver (Majors) who now has to give commercial lectures on just how great it is in a world with no cars, gets fed up, rebuilds his Porsche, and hits the long abandoned highways to reach "free" California.

A film nowhere near as good as its wonderfully daft premise suggests, the problem with it is that you can tell it's just playing it way too safe. I'm not saying it had to turn into Death Race 3000 or anything, but there are parts where you can tell cuts have been made (the very brief glimpse at some kind of sex club) to get it a PG rating, and, besides one poor old man getting shot in the chest during a raid, the encounters with the government are handled in a pretty silly fashion.

Still, the concept is fun as far as B films go, and when this does allow itself to just be what it wants to be (Major's barrel-chested macho rebel act in the first twenty minutes) it almost gets by.

That Porche is a pretty lousy choice for a cross-country escape too as, again, it has no headlights, no storage compartments for food that I could see, and an open cockpit so he can freeze to death in the mountains.

With a silliness index comparable to that of Death Race 2000, and none of the political insight, The Last Chase starts off with two strikes against it. Nevertheless, this film scored a base-hit with me and earned the "somewhat watchable" rating of 5.

If you have ever wanted to see Lee Majors siphoning regular gas from tanks abandoned 40 years ago and using it in a Formula I Car while chased by Burgess Meredith in a Sabre Jet, this is the film for you. I'm afraid that if you have never had this particular fantasy, you might want to avoid this film. Majors plays a professional race car driver forced to give up his career and dismantle his car by a US government which has outlawed petroleum use. Now let's just play along here and lets ignore the fact that the petroleum and defense industries have been the most valuable players in the election of most of the US's recent right-wing executives, and a few of the lefties too - so let's ignore this impossibility of the basic premise - and let's not even ask how these people are generating electricity, etc. I didn't notice any nukes.... Anyway. Steve Austin...ummm sorry.... Lee Majors' character decides to leave for, of all places, California, where people have not realized that petroleum use is a desire, not a right, and are carrying on the same sort of destructive culture the rest of the USA has apparently disavowed. Believability is, of course not an issue here, as the viewer is never challenged to accept any of this absurdity.

Instead, you just let it go along from ridiculous scene to ridiculous scene. And if you start to wonder how Mr. Majors kept such a straight face throughout this film, just think back on his run in The Six Million Dollar Man. And when you get bored with the Roger Corman-like 2 minute pans across screen following the ancient Burgess Meredith and his Sabre Jet, just imagine him cackling like the Penguin, or focus on the other bizarre animal noises he keeps uttering in his aerially induced euphoria.

This film is remarkably good for what it is. The script is not bad, the directing and editing are fine, the acting is decent, and the soundtrack is even acceptable. It does get boring at times, but, given the utterly ludicrous plot, it's not nearly as bad as it should have been.

In a fuel-starved future, the totalitarian government has just impounded all private vehicles. Twenty years ago, the world was ravaged by a mysterious disease. Race car driver Franklyn Hart (Lee Majors) lost his family during the epidemic. Hart is now the spokesman for the mass transit system. He is being investigated for breaking into the impound lot and in danger of re-education. Ring (Chris Makepeace) is a hacker anti-authority boarding school student. Ring goes on the run from the police and gets Hart's help to drive to "Free California". The government has to stop this symbol of personal freedom. They bring out Vietnam vet Captain Williams (Burgess Meredith) and an F-86 Sabre jet.

This is a rally for driving freedom in response to the speed limit. There are a couple cool things in this movie. However at its heart, it's a non-sensical cheesy Canadian production. I like the operations room although I wonder if it's recycled from another movie. The world in the movie makes little sense but the idea of the freedom of the road is very appealing. Burgess talking to his plane is kind of funny. The movie probably needs more comedy and not the unintended kind.

First of all, it has a great score by Gil Melle. He did cool synthesizer stuff with stuff like The Questor Tapes and Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and he doesn't disapppoint here. Even at the dullest moments, you can count on the score to give you a jolt or two.

The main problem is that everything in this movie is just...slightly off-key. Give it a better actor than Lee Majors as the "hero," and a better old fogey/jetfighter than hammy Burgess Meredith, and do a little more than just rehash Farenheit 451 with gas instead of books, and this might have worked. Chris Makepeace is okay (although the juvie bad boy/computer hacker stereotype was already overdone by '81), and the plane vs. car action sequences aren't too badly done.

*shrug* I liked it. It wasn't better than Cats, but otherwise it works for me.

Not as weird as it sounds but twice as unbelievable. Though this isn't a great movie it's a nice time killer for nostalgists. Lee Majors gets sick of the government who wishes to restrain everyone's need for speed. So he and a teen skip town and go cross country as a team that's like the Dukes of Hazard meets Batman and Robin (not the lame film, just the hero team). Things get nutty when Burgess Meredith is called in to take them down but he decides he won't and just pretend to. It's fun but all in all a cheese flick. Last words of the film: "this could set us back to the 1980's." That's is kinda scary when you think about it but John Hughes films would improve.