New York Connection

This is an amazing movie if you enjoy hoards of that classic New York ghettoness which we all remember from the 70'sand 80's.

Highlights include abandoned housing, crackers, strippers, guys firing shotguns in the middle of the street, a vicious dog mauling and other crazy antics. Other interesting incidents include the Puerto Rican gang fights , car part stripping in what looks like the Bronx, and to top it off the main plot involves the kidnapping of a child

But ladies and gentlemen, this one ain't about the plot, so bust out your favorite beer and sit down for a wild ride down crack street deep in the jungle of the Big Apple!

Night of the Juggler (Robert Butler 1980) is an interesting watch. It's not only a tense thriller with good performances, but it's also one of those movies that give a great impression of New York City before the Disneyfication. Not only that: the deterioration of the city is a major theme in the movie.

You see, Gus (Cliff Gorman) is a psychopath who blames City Hall for the squalor he lives in, and the real estate magnates for the destruction of the old neighborhoods. He lives in a derelict building in The Bronx, which was once owned by his family. Now it's a pile of rubble. 'This used to be real nice up here', he says while he walks past mountains of rubble with his young kidnap victim. He's not thinking of moving. 'I'll always live here. No matter how many *racial slur* they send in to burn the place down'.

Gus has come up with a plan: kidnap the daughter of a real estate magnate, take his money and teach him a lesson. But there's a mix-up and he ends up kidnapping the kid of an ex-cop (James Brolin), who starts a frantic manhunt through NYC's underbelly to track down the kidnapper and get his daughter back. Highlights include a brawl in a peep show, a confrontation with some genuine 'Bronx warriors' and Brolin's constant fights with his former colleagues.

It's a good movie. Not a classic by any means, but I liked the fact that the depressing state of the city was not merely a visual backdrop, but also a theme in the picture. For this reason, Night of the Juggler could make for an excellent double bill with the fascinating Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh), which was made the same year and has a similar theme running though its horror story.

This movie has it all if you love raw b-movie action. Brolin plays an ex-cop turned trucker who's on a personal manhunt to catch the maniac that kidnapped his daughter on her birthday. This sets Brolin's character on a chase across NYC from the subways to strip clubs to dog pounds and beyond.

This movie was a legend back in the day for my friends and I. We caught it on late night cable, but never managed to grab the full name of the film or the stars. What we did catch was the INCREDIBLE chase scene that takes the characters from cars to buses to trains to on foot as they crisscross Manhattan. Yeah, Bullitt and The French Connection are good and all, but the Night of the Juggler chase scene makes the action in those films seem average, if not unambitious.

This movie is sort of like the pinnacle of 70s/80s street-style film making. It has the intense, raw camera work of Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris flicks, paired with a vision of New York City akin to Wild Style (and maybe even just a hint of the Warriors). The characters here are a bizarre amalgam of clichés that still excite despite being retreads in many ways.

The bottom line - score this movie if you can! Far as I know, VHS was the final destination for this film in terms of home video. I bought my copy off of the Internet years ago and the tape was so old that it was broken. But I was determined to watch this flick (because it's so good!), so I cracked the case opened and and spent hours repairing the tape myself. It's just that awesome.

Truly this film should be called Night of the Jogger. It would make much more sense than Night of the Juggler, which has to be one of the most uninteresting titles ever assigned to a movie. Not only are there tons of joggers everywhere, but all the characters jog everywhere they go. Every time they need to go somewhere, they jog. There is no real reason for this.

Brolin and his daughter start out for her school, jogging of course. But then she decides she can jog there by herself, and Brolin turns around for the jog home. About twenty seconds later, Brolin's daughter is kidnapped from the park when she is mistaken for a rich businessman's daughter.

Here we come to one of the most implausible parts of the movie. The kidnapper throws her in the car, and she just sits there, calmly. She never tries to get out of the car. At several times they are stuck in traffic jams. Her window is down, her door is unlocked, for gods sake the car can't move, and yet she does not even try to get out of the car.

We head into a long chase scene with Brolin getting a cab to chase the kidnapper. After the kidnapper crashes his car, he grabs the daughter by the hand and they run into the subway and catch a ride. Yes, that's right, the kidnapped daughter willingly runs with the kidnapper. They are on a crowded street and yet she never plants her feet and refuses to move, or even screams for help. She just runs along with him.

When they get off the subway, the kidnapper steals a phone company van. He helps the daughter up into the front seat, has her slide over to the passenger side....and she sits there. She doesn't even attempt to go open the door or get out. This girl should be charged as an accessory in her kidnapping!

The other really annoying part of the movie is that as Brolin tries to find his daughter, he is arrested or stopped by the police. But instead of saying "my daughters been kidnapped." He keeps saying they have to let him go, and either being really vague or trying to explain the whole story. Same thing happens when he tries to find what the kidnapper dropped outside a live girls porno place. He goes into the little viewing booths, and does he say his daughter has been kidnapped and that he needs help. Of course not, the big dope says "I'm looking for a girl..." Oh yeah, that's really going to help in a peep show setting. Sigh....

The movie is fairly frustrating as the characters sabotage themselves over and over again. It is only through this contrived sabotage that the kidnapper gets the daughter and Brolin doesn't get her back right away. And the kidnapper is really wacko, but not in a scary way. We find out his motives when he explains the entire reason to the daughter as they are walking to his house - yeah, that's right, the daughter is still walking along with the kidnapper. Hell, he isn't even holding her hand now. So if you can stand the frustration or if you are with friends and want to laugh at the sheer contrivances that keep this movie going, be my guest and watch this movie - and remember the movie is about joggers, not jugglers.

It's quite funny, really… I live in Brussels; the city recently referred to as a "hellhole" by the newly elected (at the time I'm writing this) US President Donald Trump. Judging by this grim & gritty early eighties movie, however, the only genuine hellhole in the world is New York … and that's where Trump lives!

No, seriously, apart from being a fast-paced and darkly entertaining action/thriller, "Night of the Juggler" is primarily an anti-tourist campaign for the city of New York! Nothing you see here will ever make you want to go city-tripping in the Big Apple! We're talking pauperized ghettos, Puerto Rican gang-wars, filthy rancid sex clubs and maniacal, shotgun-wielding and corrupt policemen. Add to this a cast full of unlikable characters, brutal violence, raw editing & camera-work, perverted undertones and genuine adult actresses, and you seemingly have the perfect recipe of a typical '70s exploitation cocktail. But the odd thing is that "Night of the Juggler" isn't just some sleazy and Z-grade drive-in flick, but an actually well- budgeted production from the distinguished Columbia Pictures studios!

The teen daughter of ex-cop turned truck driver Sean Boyd gets kidnapped in broad daylight and in the middle of a crowded Central Park, but nobody reacts or even seems to care. Yes, THAT is the New York City as illustrated in "Night of the Juggler". The kidnapper is a racist pervert named Gus Soltic, but he mistook Boyd's daughter for the daughter of a wealthy real estate contractor that he wants to extort and blame for the downfall of his childhood neighborhood. Whilst Soltic never properly realizes that he took the wrong girl, her father literally races – on foot and by car – through the city. He searches for clues and witnesses, but he also flees for the police because many of his former colleagues hate his guts.

"Night of the Juggler" is a film full of flaws, imbecilities and shortcomings. For example, and like several other reviewers already righteously pointed out, the relationship between the teenage girl and her kidnapper is bizarre and implausible. She doesn't fight back or scream hysterically! She doesn't grab one of the numerous opportunities to escape or call for help! In fact, she doesn't resist at all. Her father doesn't make his own life any easier, neither, since he never properly makes the effort of explaining to the police or potential witnesses what has happened to his daughter. The dialogues are often underdeveloped and the film is overall too long. Particularly the whole climax is too tedious and fairly useless, because it takes place in the sewers and half of the footage is too dark to follow. And yet, I really liked the hefty atmosphere as well as many other things; like the wild taxi ride at the beginning and the gloriously insane character played by Dan Hedaya. He plays a cop who used to be very corrupt and got degraded due to Boyd's testimony, when he sees Boyd popping up in his precinct again he literally goes bonkers! Lead actors James Brolin, Cliff Gorman and Richard Castellano give away more than adequate performances, but they honestly can't match the psychopathic facial expressions linked to Hedaya's acting! Steady direction also, by Robert Butler, who's mainly known for his Disney live-action classics "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" and "The Barefoot Executive". Rather than Disney guff, "Night of the Juggler" more fits into the category with other vile NYC thrillers like "Maniac", "Ms. 45" and "The Exterminator".