Frank Salazar (Corbin Bernsen) is a skilled bank robber from the East Coast who is currently hiding out from the law in a small town in Montana. But true to his nature, he finds himself scoping out the local bank. When he finds that the bank is holding an exceptionally large amount of cash, he comes up with a plan to rob it and contacts four of his friends to help him pull off the job. Before he can hook up with his buddies George (Ed O’Neill) and Bill (Daniel Roebuck), two cops who have been chasing him all the way from Newark, arrest him. While Frank is being driven across the country to face charges, the rest of his gang has arrived in town.
Ray (Lou Diamond Phillips) is the wheelman charged with picking up the rest of the team. Max (Fred Gwynne) is the cantankerous old explosives expert. Nick (William Russ) is the safecracker. And Carlos (Ruben Blades) is the muscle of the group. Arriving at Frank’s hideout not only are they unable to find their leader, but they have no idea what the plan is or if he will return. To make things even worse, they know nothing about one another and if they can be trusted.
After spending a couple of days waiting for his return and fighting with one another, which culminates with Nick destroying the getaway vehicle and getting arrested for drunk driving while the other three end up robbing liquor stores to put up his bail money, they all agree to rob the bank without Frank. As they finally decide to work together as a team and formulate their own plan, Frank has managed to slip free from his captors and is headed on a footrace through the rugged Montana wilderness to get back to them.
It’s hard to believe with the great cast that was involved in the making of the film it did not make a better showing at the box office. Not only are they all good actors, but most of them were in the prime of their careers. Part of me wonders if it had to do with the marketing as it was touted as a comedy. There were some funny parts that made me smile as inevitably nothing goes right for anyone, but it didn’t have enough big laughs for me to call it a comedy film.
The Blu-ray is presented in 1:85:1 ratio with a DTS audio track. The video was nice and clean with no degradation issues and a sharp picture. The audio had a good surround sound feel and was immersive, using all the speakers and not just the center one like a lot of older films do.
The Blu-ray had only a few Special Features. There was an “Audio Commentary by Writer/Director Jim Kauf and Producer Lynn Kauf” with the original presentation as well as the “Original Theatrical Trailer”, and finally an “Interview with actor Daniel Roebuck.” The interview was interesting as you got the experience of filming through his character-actor perspective of meeting and working with all the famous actors that were popular at the time of filming. It would have been nice to have heard more from the rest of the cast, but with this type of release you’re lucky to get anything at all.
Going into this viewing, I did not think I had seen this before, but while viewing, I remembered seeing a couple scenes with Gwynne trying to blow up the safe and fond memories came back to me as I realized I had watched the film previously. For the most part, I did enjoy the film and I really liked the characters and really enjoyed the performances. The storyline was interesting and kept my focus and attention as I wanted to see them get away with the bank heist and how they were going to accomplish it. The one thing that held me back was all the cross-country scenes as Frank fell down cliffs, sat on an ant hill, and ran around half naked being chased by wild animals. Normally, I like slapstick humor, but it just wasn’t strong enough and left me dreading many of his scenes. Every time he arrived on camera, I just wanted to fast forward it. Thankfully, he wasn’t on camera that much and since he ended up going back to jail it made the ending a little more satisfying.
