Stand on It!

I grew up with the Bandit and Dukes of Hazzard, so I am the target market for a film like this - and there's some really good stuff here! But unfortunately I think the low budget created obstacles that just could not be overcome.

First, the good: The pace of this film is really good, it moves along and never drags. There are some editing issues which I'll get to, but the filmmakers were clearly very capable in a larger sense, which is so important, particularly for this genre.

Great performances across the board. Schneider (who stars, wrote and directed) is a fine actor. His dramatic performances show us he can hold his own, and in lighter fare like this, his charisma shines through. The supporting cast is in my opinion uniformly good, too. Robinson, as the bride, hits all the right notes. Tyrus, as the Sherrif, was delightful. What he lacks in acting experience he more than makes up for in presence, and as a result I loved every minute that he was on screen.

There were some nice stunts here. One car is jumped, another is rolled, and a bunch are dunked into rivers and swamps. They even include the famous Bandit stunt where the roof of the police car is torn off - that was pretty ambitious for such a small film!

I love the indie nature of this film, and I have a tonne of respect for Schneider for setting up John Schneider Studios to make small-scale films of a more personal nature. While I don't agree at all with his politics he shares on YouTube, I can see he is a decent man who is putting his money where his mouth is. I really do respect him as an artist. Everyone should check out his other films (they are criminally under-rated by users on IMDB for some reason, whereas I feel this film is rated too highly - but hey, this is just my opinion).

Now the not-so-good: Road trip / car chase movies are tough to do cheaply. We can see that a lot of the budget for this one went into the car stunts/wrecks, and these scenes are all done pretty well. However, the stuff in between has two problems: First, there is not enough coverage shot of the cars actually on the road, resulting in some very confusing and disorienting editing. I suspect this was due to the editor just not having enough footage to piece the scenes together in a better way.

All of the shots in the interior of the vehicles were done using a green screen, and it is very obvious. It would have been less distracting if there was better continuity when the camera switched from driver to passenger, and an entirely different topography is visible on the other side of the road! When I compare these scenes to, say, "Anderson Bench" (also written and directed by Schneider), which had some similar scenes but was shot on location, it looks awful in comparison. I know that much of this film is dialogue-heavy, and the vehicles are the main locations, so I am sure green-screen made economic sense.

These budget-related sacrifices unfortunately will mar this film as amateurish, and unfortunately for a film in this genre I don't think it could have been avoided. However, my biggest complaint could have been: The story here spends too much energy getting the set pieces of the original Bandit in place that it misses the mark on character development. He don't see the bond between Schneider's Duke and Robinson's Fred really happen like it did with Bandit and Carrie in the original. There is one brief scene that hints that maybe that was going to happen (off camera?), but while they have lots of dialogue together in the car, it doesn't drive their relationship forward very well. The actors share some charisma with one another, so I would have preferred some space for that. There are other scenes, including a bar fight, that don't lead anywhere, that could have been sacrificed instead.

It's a decent tribute to Bandit, with enough of a modern twist to make it just different enough that it's not a remake - and there are enough nods to the original, and to the Dukes of Hazzard, to make any fan smile. This is obvious by its high rating on IMDB in comparison to Schneider's other films - this movie has a lot of nostalgia behind it, and that's not a bad thing.

But as a film on its own merits it has some serious flaws. Still, I look forward to seeing what John Schneider Studios will make next, as the world needs more creative independent films. And you know what they say, if you don't fail sometimes, it means you're not trying enough new things.

I was 16 years old when Smokey and the Bandit came out, so my best friend Brian and I know every line for every character. With that said, when I first found this movie while streaming, I thought it was a rip-off remake, which I would not watch. Then I researched it and saw it was a tribute movie and that John Schneider was actually an extra in the original. That got my attention and piqued my interest, so I watched it. I watched in the spirit in which it was made, not as a bad remake, but as a quirky tribute. I really wanted to like it, but I didn't. I only laughed twice.

Characters and Dialog: I found it amusing how they switched up the names and what they referenced, but the acting was horrible. The actors sounded like they were actors reading or just saying their lines from a script, not actual characters talking to each other. The way they portrayed the different personalities was wooden, and that was for everyone. I actually cringed when some of the lines were said, which really surprised me. The character of Sheriff Cletus T Necessary was the worst. If he was trying to emulate Jackie Gleason, it was an epic fail. I cringed at most of Sheriff Necessary's lines, sometimes yelling at the TV, "No," (as in 'Don't say that'). There were so many missed opportunities for greatness; great lines missed, omitted, or just flubbed. Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed, and Jackie Gleason actually lived the words they said, we believed them and believed in them. The actors in this film just read their lines off of a dialog page and then repeated them in front of the camera.

Car Chases: The car chases and crashes didn't make any sense. There was the set-up shot, some mumble jumble in the middle, and then the end shot. Where the police car ended up (lake or pond, playing field, flatbed trailer, rolling down an embankment, etc) made no sense based upon where it had been in the previous shot. I am not going into specifics because those were covered by other reviewers, and I pretty much agree with everything they said. I can only add that I asked myself many times, "How did that happen?"

I think I would have walked out had I seen this in a movie theater, but since I watched it streaming at home, I powered through it, hoping it would get better, which it didn't. I gave it a 2 because it already had so many 1's and I gave it an extra point for effort. I applauded their effort, but not their execution.

My dad was super excited for this run off, there were some good parts and some funny moments/ characters but it's like it was on a 5$ budget. Everything just was subpar, and I guess that's just how it is. I'm glad some people enjoyed it however I really do wish they did a better job when it is supposed to be a modern runoff of a fav classic. It felt like Disney doing a poor live action of an old fan fav.

I recently came across "Stand on It!" on YouTube, and although I didn't sit through the entire movie, I saw enough while skipping through scenes to get a solid impression-and unfortunately, it wasn't a good one.

Right away, the film's production quality is distracting. The camera work is subpar and often feels shaky and amateurish, like it was shot on a low-end device. It doesn't resemble something ready for release-more like a rough first cut or a student project. Even more jarring were the clear signs of green screen usage in certain scenes. These moments completely pulled me out of the viewing experience and made the film feel even more cheaply made. There may have been some low-budget CGI involved too, which only adds to the artificial, unpolished atmosphere.

The storytelling is hard to follow-not just because I skipped around, but because the narrative feels disjointed even in the scenes I did watch. It lacks flow and cohesion, making it tough to care about what's going on. There's no real charm or wit, which makes this especially disappointing for a movie that's meant to pay tribute to the 1977 classic Smokey and the Bandit.

Speaking of tribute, the characters here fall completely flat when compared to their iconic counterparts. Tim Phillips, who plays the Bandit-like role, does give a somewhat decent performance. He has a bit of screen presence and occasionally channels the charisma you'd expect from a Bandit figure, so I'll give him that. However he doesn't resemble the Bandit as his and Burt Reynolds eyes and facial structures don't match. Also, the Sheriff Bufford T. Justice character-originally made legendary by Jackie Gleason-is a major letdown. Matthew Cutter's portrayal lacks Gleason's over-the-top energy, and his accent doesn't come close. It's a failed imitation of a larger-than-life character, and it stands out in all the wrong ways.

As someone who loves the original Smokey and the Bandit, this film felt more like a parody gone wrong than a genuine homage. It doesn't capture the excitement, humor, or heart that made the 1977 film so memorable. If anything, it undermines the legacy with a lazy, thrown-together effort.

It's honestly kind of funny that Universal Pictures hasn't taken any legal action-maybe they saw Stand on It! For what it is: a harmless, low-budget imitation that poses no threat to the original's legacy. In that sense, ignoring it might be the wisest move they could make.

If you're a diehard fan of the original and are hoping to relive the fun, I'd recommend steering clear of this one. Unless you're morbidly curious or in the mood to see how not to do a tribute, there's really no reason to spend your time on Stand on It!

John Schneider is a big kid at heart and it shows in this movie. How many of us would love to relive one of your favorite movies from your youth and star in it? He obviously didn't have the budget but he paid tribute to a classic the best he could. Sure the acting and editing were rough. But I didn't expect anything else. Thanks John and team for taking me back to my youth. I am actually in the process of obtaining and recreating a movie car from a different movie and now I want to make a tribute movie.