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.

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.

Why would you watch a cheap rehash?

There's really not much else to say. I'm sure someone's heart was in it but like...just make your own movie. This is unimaginative.

I thought that Smoky and the Bandit 2 and 3 were bad. They are masterpieces compared to this. This film is an insult to the cast, crew, fans of Smoky and the Bandit. A crowd funding campaign turned into a paid dream for John Schneider. I've worked with him on other films and he takes most of the money from low budget projects. Super nice guy but greedy and arrogant. This movie looks like it was shot on a 1997 consumer camcorder. The actors are most likely aspiring actors that paid for their roles. It attempts to be funny but it's not. I paid to support this project and am embarrassed as I really had high hopes but it is truly an embarrassment and an insult to fans of Smoky and the Bandit and Dukes of Hazzard.

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.