LastingAware The greatest movie ever!

Holstra Boring, long, and too preachy.

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

gdeangel Not many folks today go around thinking about Barry Goldwater's slogan from the 1964 Republican convention. I wasn't even alive then, but as a child who spent more than a few sick days with a TV, a VCR, no cable, and a couple Uhf bootleg movies, one of them "The Last Chase", I understood that even though "extremism in the defence of virtue" may not be a vice, I could tell you at age 8 that it was a bad policy to follow. Others have noted the various issues that come up in this movie. The energy crisis that isn't solved by new technology, but by the iron fist of regulation. Social control achieved through restriction of movement and herding people into cities. "Re-education" as a stand in for jail. Devolution of government into authoritarianism. An Ebola like plague laying waste to America.These issues get paraded through the plot in a pretty clear black-and-white line up. Fast cars = good. Government bureaucrats = bad. And for that reason, this film has largely been written off as a mere adventure film, one that stacks up poorly against its contemporaries. But strip away the zooming car shots and barrel rolling areal sequences, and you get something that is a little bit GATACA, a little bit Vanishing Point, but with a very 1980s Reaganesque ideology.You also have a few shallow side plots that are meant to break up the diadacticism. The creation of a father-son bond. The hopelessness of losing your purpose in life. The emotional baggage of causing a fatal crash, or losing your loved ones to premature disease.Today all those things would be played out with color filters and weeping string accompaniments-over-dialuage that are the hallmark of post LORT "adventure" films. Back then, that was out of the question. Protagonists like square jawed Lee Majors looked you squarely through the camera lense and gritted out lines like "I've done a lot of losing in my life; I don't want to lose you too." All actor. Maybe not the best actor, but no fluffy BS. Solid performances by Majors and Meredith here, and nothing but praise for George Touliatos's Hawkins. Performances backed up, not tread upon, by a rich and powerful musical landscape which is, in my opinion, Gil Melle's best.The story is simple: a man and a boy on the road, the latter there to expose the complex layers of the protagonist's character. Today, the story would be about a bunch of tweeny kids wrestling with themselves through emotional full-nelsons that would put Hulk Hulgan to shame. Got to play to the youth market if you want box-office $$$.All I can say it, the conflicts in this movie make it well overdue for a remake, but thankfully the wrong people haven't made one. Redone in the minimalist style of "Road to Paloma", the 917 CanAm Spyder could come roaring to life again for an epic remake, but probably end up a commercial flop. Redone with typical Hollywood sensibilities (I'm thinking "Rollerball" now), it would still be a commercial flop. So there it is... if the film sounds interesting to you, nothing for it but to start looking through those crates of VHS bootlegs at the next yard sale you drive by... until, that is, the oil runs out.

Coventry I only have myself and my ridiculously high expectations to blame, of course, but "The Last Chase" was one of the biggest disappointments in years! Here I was hoping to see a tremendously cool car chase motion picture, in the same style as "Vanishing Point" only in a futuristic and thus even more desolate setting. In other words, a virulent and adrenalin-rushing road adventure in which one awesome hero gets chased by an increasingly larger army of dim-witted cops that continuously crash their cars or drive into ravines. Well, like sadly far too often in my life, I was wrong. "The Last Chase" is a dull and moralizing – almost prophetic – drama about the true definition of freedom and blah blah blah. The year is … um, I forgot already, but it's the not too distant future and the new fascist government prohibited all forms of private transportation due to the scarcity of oil products. Franklyn Hart used to be a racer, but now he's assigned to go from school to school and preach about how the 1980's were barbaric times. During a moment of clarity, however, he fixes his hideous old car (I think it's a Porsche) and heads out to California along with a rebellious teenager. The authorities naturally cannot allow this, but they don't have any means to stop Franklyn, so they hire an 80-year-old war veteran and his antique F-86 Jet to stop him. Let me assure you, it's a truly ludicrous sight to see a Sci-Fi movie using scenery from the Korean War. This could have been a great action/adventure flick, but instead became a boring and talkative drama with too much pretension. Lee Majors clearly craves back to the successful days of "Six Million Dollar Man" and Burgess Meredith, although vivid and outrageous, looks just as antique as the plane he's flying.

Clint Walker ...in a vehicle with no headlights.Here's the story. In a future time when the government won't let you own private modes of transportation, a former race car driver (Majors) who now has to give commercial lectures on just how great it is in a world with no cars, gets fed up, rebuilds his Porsche, and hits the long abandoned highways to reach "free" California.A film nowhere near as good as its wonderfully daft premise suggests, the problem with it is that you can tell it's just playing it way too safe. I'm not saying it had to turn into Death Race 3000 or anything, but there are parts where you can tell cuts have been made (the very brief glimpse at some kind of sex club) to get it a PG rating, and, besides one poor old man getting shot in the chest during a raid, the encounters with the government are handled in a pretty silly fashion.Still, the concept is fun as far as B films go, and when this does allow itself to just be what it wants to be (Major's barrel-chested macho rebel act in the first twenty minutes) it almost gets by.That Porche is a pretty lousy choice for a cross-country escape too as, again, it has no headlights, no storage compartments for food that I could see, and an open cockpit so he can freeze to death in the mountains.

Grand Stupid, mindless drivel about a jet assembled within hours by mechanics who have never worked on airplanes (piloted by Burgess Meredith) chasing a Porsche race car which runs on decades-old gasoline sludge, driven by Lee Majors, with Chris Makepeace as the runaway techno-wiz who can McGyver spare parts into a radio receiver which can pick up all frequencies simultaneously, and who somehow learned how to acquire and use chemicals to make high explosives in a perfectly peaceful society. As moronic as it sounds. Terrible waste of Burgess Meredith, but Chris Makepeace may at least be forgiven on the grounds that this was only his second film.