Two-Minute Warning (1976)

2minwarningNearly a quarter-century before he famously dared Washington, D.C. to pry his rifle “from my cold, dead hands,” Charlton Heston tried to separate a sniper from his weapon of choice in the sports-world thriller Two-Minute Warning. Talk about a political flip-flop!

In his fourth disaster film (following Skyjacked, Airport 1975 and Earthquake), Heston stars as Capt. Peter Holly, in charge of the LAPD’s plan to foil a gunman’s plot to open fire on the L.A. Memorial Coliseum’s crowd assembled for a championship football game. Perched atop a scoreboard and in preparatory mode, the sniper (Warren Miller, Married to the Mob) is glimpsed first by the camera blimp overhead. Cops are alerted, and enter Holly and SWAT Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes, Rosemary’s Baby). The two talk strategy and mention no fewer than three times the unfortunate maintenance man who got “butt-stroked off the ladder.”

2minwarning1The sniper’s target? Oh, just about 100,000 pigskin fans, but to guess who will bite the bullet(s), place your bets on the bleachers’ numerous famous faces, including Walter Pidgeon (Forbidden Planet) as a pickpocket, Jack Klugman (TV’s Quincy, M.E.) as a gambler and Beau Bridges (Max Payne) as a hothead father who slaps the shit out of his young son for revealing Dad’s employment status (read: not) to the pennant salesman. Playing themselves are Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, Merv Griffin and Andy Sidaris, then an Emmy-winning sports director vs. the Russ Meyer of action flicks he would become.

Per disaster-genre regulations, director Larry Peerce (1989’s Wired) continuously revisits the dozen or so subplots like so many spinning plates. It’s tough to tire of a film that walks that tightrope in double time. It is easy, however, to tire of Two-Minute Warning’s maddeningly repetitive musical cue. I forgive Peerce for dropping the needle on it so often, because the eventual melee triggered by the villain’s squeezed trigger is a smorgasbord of fallen (and falling) spectators. —Rod Lott

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