I caught this on TCM the other morning. I had seen it years ago, and it was about as bad as I remembered. Cassavetes was a wonderful actor but he appeared in a lot of lousy pictures to earn the dough that financed FACES, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, GLORIA, and his other directorial efforts.
Perhaps GLI INTOCCABILI suffers in translation to MACHINE GUN McCAIN. Some of the English dialogue seemed shoehorned into the original Italian, out of place and nonsensical as English. But it was the relationships among the characters that seemed most outlandish here -- particularly between McCain and his "son" (Pierluigi Apra?) and, later, with Irene (Britt Eklund). There's no chemistry among these actors, yet we're supposed to believe that their character relationships are significant. Too bad the scriptwriter didn't bring Gena Rowlands into the film in the first ten minutes -- she would have been even more credible as McCain's longtime accomplice and lover. And it would have been nice if there had been some opportunities for interaction between McCain and Joey Adamo (Peter Falk, who also was wasting his talent here).
The Vegas heist is the one part of the film that works, but it takes a lot of dull exposition to get there, and -- as another poster here points out -- how can a career criminal as wily as McCain not have had an escape plan worked out before the heist? If the ending of a story is as inevitable as the fates, then it had better be a damned good story. MACHINE GUN McCAIN is tedious, predictable, and in the end, just plain shipshod storytelling. (However, I do hope some bright political satirist picks up on the closing ballad in the film and applies it to a montage of John S. McCain's campaign photos after he loses the presidential election in November.) By the way, McCain's submachine gun is a Sten, not a Thompson.
Perhaps GLI INTOCCABILI suffers in translation to MACHINE GUN McCAIN. Some of the English dialogue seemed shoehorned into the original Italian, out of place and nonsensical as English. But it was the relationships among the characters that seemed most outlandish here -- particularly between McCain and his "son" (Pierluigi Apra?) and, later, with Irene (Britt Eklund). There's no chemistry among these actors, yet we're supposed to believe that their character relationships are significant. Too bad the scriptwriter didn't bring Gena Rowlands into the film in the first ten minutes -- she would have been even more credible as McCain's longtime accomplice and lover. And it would have been nice if there had been some opportunities for interaction between McCain and Joey Adamo (Peter Falk, who also was wasting his talent here).
The Vegas heist is the one part of the film that works, but it takes a lot of dull exposition to get there, and -- as another poster here points out -- how can a career criminal as wily as McCain not have had an escape plan worked out before the heist? If the ending of a story is as inevitable as the fates, then it had better be a damned good story. MACHINE GUN McCAIN is tedious, predictable, and in the end, just plain shipshod storytelling. (However, I do hope some bright political satirist picks up on the closing ballad in the film and applies it to a montage of John S. McCain's campaign photos after he loses the presidential election in November.) By the way, McCain's submachine gun is a Sten, not a Thompson.