Luke is a wanderer who drives across Arizona in a car and a horse trailer. He goes to visit his friend Moose in prison who claims he was framed. Moose asks him to accompany his teenage son Matt (16) to his new cottage, "Green Heaven", which he won in a poker game. While traveling on the highway, Luke and Matt are attacked by two truckers and later on by a motorcycle gang, though Matt makes friends with the latter. Luke and Matt arrive at the cottage, in the middle of a forest, and befriend the Amish neighbor Eli, who has four daughters. Two lawyers representing a certain Mr. Lawson want to buy the land, but Luke rejects them. The cottage is later destroyed in an explosion. Luke goes to personally see Mr. Lawson in the office, but then recognizes it is his former captain from the Vietnam War who feigned his death and escaped with cocaine. Lawson's men chase Luke and Matt, but then the motorcycle gang shows up to help them, and the police arrests Lawson. Moose is then freed from prison.
The sometimes inspired Italian comedy director E.B. Clucher, who cooperated five times with Terence Hill and B. Spencer ("They Call Me Trinity", "Go For It"), and also even more separately with them individually, did not manage to extract something more this time around in this meandering road movie that works better during its (sparse) comedy scenes than its action and chase scenes. Terence Hill still has some charm as the naughty protagonist Luke who ignites a few chuckles here and there in the first half. In one such good joke, while traveling in his car, Luke realizes he is short on money, so he decides to sell his horse from his horse trailer. Luke gives the horse to a farm and gets 300$ from the buyer, a cowboy. Later, Luke just drives away, but suddenly stops and just waits on the road—until the horse runs towards him and goes back into the trailer, as Luke protests: "It never took you this long to escape from a farm!" In another, Luke hears that two burglars with machine guns want to enter his motel room through the window, so he plucks the electric cord from a lamp and throws it inside a bucket of water, which electrocutes the burglar when he steps inside it. The rest is rather overstretched, thin and without any creativity or ingenuity that adorned some of Clucher's and Hill's best films. Hill always wanted to make it into the American cinema market, and thus "They Call Me Renegade" serves as his wishful project set in Arizona and featuring American actors. The vague story about some land that is coveted by a greedy lawyer is just an excuse for Hill's display of acting, but there are not that many good jokes this time around for him to seize them. It feels more like an exercise in filmmaking than a truly engaging and fun film.
Grade:+
No comments:
Post a Comment