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.

As noted by other IMDb users here, "Certain Fury" is essentially an updating of the Sidney Poitier / Tony Curtis movie "The Defiant Ones", though changing the sex of the central characters as well as adding gratuitous exploitation material. Nothing really wrong with that idea, at least if you are as big a fan of exploitation movies as I am, but the end results are only partially successful.

The movie gets off to a great start, being swift and packing in much exploitation and other good stuff. Though after the first thirty or so minutes, the movie becomes greatly uneven. There is some good stuff to follow, but they are bright moments lost in a suddenly slowing storyline. The movie almost gets boring at times because of this. Also, the ending is kind of weak, written and directed in a way that seems to come out of a much more serious movie than this.

Is the movie worth seeing? Well, if you are a patient fan of B movie exploitation, and you can see the movie cheaply or for free, then you'll probably get a reasonable amount of enjoyment out of it. If not, you'll probably be in the title state long before the movie reaches the ending.

"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.

Tatum O'Neal and Irene Cara end up in court together. When a shootout in the courtroom cause everyone to flee, Irene and Tatum inadvertently end up running from the bullets and the cops. Pretty fast paced action keeps this B-Movie humming along pretty good. Tatum and Irene believe it or not have good chemistry together. Tatum plays a hardened toughy pretty well and in my opinion makes this movie entertaining. A little far fetched (what Hollywood flick isn't?) but still enjoyable. See it uncut as a TV version will be heavily edited. Peter Fonda makes a cameo as a sleazebag. One thing I learned from this movie is that sewer gas is highly flammable? Who knew?

Oscar-winners Tatum O'Neal and Irene Cara in an exploitation B-flick? Well, yes and no. "Certain Fury" was obviously made to appeal to the midnight-movie crowds, but there is strength in some of O'Neal's scenes with Cara (playing two girls on the lam after a courtroom shootout leaves blood and bodies everywhere). I liked it when Tatum suddenly turns maternal towards Irene and nurses her back to health (after rescuing her from a drug den). With Cara slung over one shoulder burbling about her mom, Tatum quietly says "I know, I know." This is a good scene; in fact, the picture has several good moments, but every bit with Cara's father (played by Moses Gunn on the verge of tears) is a bummer and Peter Fonda's cameo appearance is awful (you can't tell if he's slumming without effort or if he's just a lousy actor). There's an elaborately staged fight scene between O'Neal and her boy-toy which is unintentionally funny, and the dialogue is so perpetually profane it becomes a running joke.