Notícias

The great director discusses some of his favorite movies with host Josh Olson.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The Alzheimer Case a.k.a. Memory of a Killer (2003)

Memory (Tbd)

The Protégé (2021)

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Cast A Deadly Spell (1991)

The Mask Of Zorro (1998)

GoldenEye (1995)

Casino Royale (2006)

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)

Slap Shot (1977) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary

Salt (2010)

Atomic Blonde (2017) – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Oliver Twist (1948)

Dr. No (1962) – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary

The Guns Of Navarone (1962)

The Dirty Dozen (1967) – Ed Neumeier’s trailer commentary

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Dennis Cozzalio’s 70mm reissue review

The Spy Who Loved Me...

The closing and award ceremony of the 6th edition of Herat International Women’s Film Festival kicked off on Thursday evening, November 19 at Darul Aman new-constructed historical palace in Kabul city, with presence of national and international invitees from different countries; cinema professionals, movie stars, women and human rights activists and government authorities, including the Minister of Information and culture Mr. Tahir Zahir and Nargis Abyar, director of acclaimed Iranian drama “Track 143”, “Breath” and “When the Moon Was Full” who served as a jury member for the International Narrative Feature Films Competition.

The ceremony began with a live music performance by the Zohra Orchestra (Afghanistan’s first all-female orchestra) and was presented jointly by one of the co-founders and program managers of the festival and Tolo TV’s famous presenter Aimal Asifi, and Manizha Abassi, writer and poet. Initially, the presenters offered their heartfelt thanks, on behalf of the festival,...

Acclaimed stuntman and action director extraordinaire Jesse V. Johnson joins us to discuss the U.S. based action films and filmmakers that have influenced him the most.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

On The Waterfront (1954)

Fultah Fisher’s Boarding House (1922)

Undisputed (2002)

Undisputed II: Last Man Standing (2006)

Undisputed III: Redemption (2010)

Boyka: Undisputed (2016)

The Killer Elite (1975)

Convoy (1978)

The Osterman Weekend (1983)

Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

Straw Dogs (1971)

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995)

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

The Birdcage (1996)

Cross of Iron (1977)

Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974)

Easy Rider (1969)

Fail Safe (1964)

The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

Ride The High Country (1962)

Major Dundee (1965)

Jinxed! (1982)

Beowulf (2007)

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)

The Girl Hunters (1963)

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)

Point Blank (1967)

Falling Down (1993)

M (1951)

M (1931)

The Black Vampire (1953)

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Scum (1979)

Elephant (1989)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), possibly Joe’s favorite John Ford...

Starring Andrew Robinson (Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick), Clare Higgins (Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, Silent Witness), Ashley Laurence (Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, Lurking Fear), Sean Chapman (Made in Britain, Scum) and directed by Clive Barker (Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions), Hellraiser is returning to cinemas and receiving a gorgeous Blu-ray Steelbook just in time for Halloween!

That’s right folks Pinhead and his Cenobites are back in the cinema to celebrate the big 30th year anniversary and guess what… The folks at Arrow Films/Video are releasing a beautiful steelbook on October 30th too! If your a horror hound this is a must buy steelbook and a must revisit in the cinema. The 30th Anniversary re-release of Hellraiser – appropriately debuting on Friday 13th October – gives audiences a chance to see it once more in all its gory big screen glory and for the uninitiated to have their souls torn apart for the first time!

For those who are unfamiliar with Hellraiser,...

A generic spy story becomes an inspired light comedy with the application of great talent led by the star-power of Walter Matthau. Matthau’s CIA spook hooks up with old flame Glenda Jackson to retaliate against his insufferable CIA boss (Ned Beatty) with a humiliating tell-all book about the agency’s dirty tricks history. Matthau’s sloppy, slouchy master agent is a comic delight; Ronald Neame’s stylishly assured direction makes a deadly spy chase into a wholly pleasant romp.

Hopscotch

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 163

1980 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 105 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 15, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom, David Matthau, George Baker, Ivor Roberts, Lucy Saroyan, Severn Darden, George Pravda.

Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson, Brian W. Roy

Production Designer: William J. Creber

Film Editor: Carl Kress

Original Music: Ian Fraser

Written by Bryan Forbes from a novel by Brian Garfield

Produced...

Right now, you might best know Macon Blair as an actor who often works with Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier. Blair broke onto the scene in front of the camera in Saulnier's 2013 revenge film Blue Ruin, but now the actor has expanded his storytelling abilities behind the lens by writing and directing a new movie for Netflix called I don't feel at home in this world anymore. (yes, with the stylized lower case font and period at the end included). It's about a woman named Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) who enlists the help of a weirdo named Tony (Elijah Wood) to help her track down the guys who broke into her house and stole her stuff. It's a small, self-contained story that works almost like a buddy comedy for the first half before some intense violence abruptly enters the fray and has catastrophic effects on how the movie operates from that point on.

Charlie Bronson cashed in big with this lightweight action thriller co-starring Jill Ireland and Robert Duvall. Did Duvall get involved because the original concept was a serious look at political scandals between big business, the CIA and Chile? The clues from the real source story are still there.

Breakout

Region B + A Blu-ray

Koch Media / Explosive Media (De)

1975 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date January 17, 2017 / Der Mann ohne Nerven / Available from Amazon.de Eur 15,99

Starring: Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Sheree North, John Huston, Jorge Moreno, Paul Mantee, Emilio Fernandez, Alan Vint, Roy Jenson, John Huston.

Cinematography: Lucien Ballard

Editor: Bud Isaacs

Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Written by: Howard B. Kreitsek, Marc Norman, Elliott Baker suggested by the book Ten Second Jailbreak by Warren Hinckle, William Turner, Eliot Asinof.

Produced by: Robert Chartoff, Irwin Winkler

Directed by: Tom Gries

Charles Bronson seems to have been an unhappy...

In the early '70s Walter Matthau excelled in three powerful cops 'n' robbers movies; the second sees him as a tough, laconic San Francisco detective charged with an impossible task -- running down a machine gun mass murderer, with no clues and no living witnesses. The Laughing Policeman Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1973 / Color / 1:85 enhanced widescreen / 112 min. / Street Date October 18, 2016 / available through Kl Studio Classics / 29.95 Starring Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern, Louis Gossett Jr., Albert Paulsen, Anthony Zerbe, Val Avery, Cathy Lee Crosby, Mario Gallo, Joanna Cassidy, Shirley Ballard, William Hansen, Paul Koslo, Louis Guss, Clifton James, Gregory Sierra, Warren Finnerty, Matt Clark, Joseph Bernard, Leigh French, Anthony Costello. Cinematography David M. Walsh Film Editor Bob Wyman Original Music Charles Fox Written by Thomas Rickman from the novel by Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo Produced and Directed by Stuart Rosenberg

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Viewers that like Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three...

(This is the first in an occasional series in which I remember some of the best double features I’ve been lucky enough to see projected in a theater.)

The New Beverly Cinema, the oldest surviving revival theater in Los Angeles, has this week dished up a time-capsule glimpse into America’s popular obsession with Cb, or citizen’s band, radio and the largely mythological outlaw trucker culture through which it crackled. If you’re of a certain age (mine), and you ever cruised around town or down the highway jabbering to friends and strangers on an open channel frequency (I did—my handle was The Godfather!), given the opportunity I don’t see how you could possibly resist the chance to see the ultimate trucker-cb action-comedy pairing, Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit and Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy. (I couldn’t!) As of this writing, the morning of...

Arthur Penn’s notorious, arguably ‘revisionist’ Western The Missouri Breaks makes it to Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber, with packaging that keeps the film’s initial infamous discrepancies alive and well with star Marlon Brando’s name retaining top billing. Though it would be Brando’s last sizeable role, the film’s main protagonist is really Jack Nicholson as a matter-of-fact horse thief who runs up against a prosperous man who holds himself above the law by failing to recognize that the rest of the country’s outlying frontiers have them.

The term revisionist is problematic in reference to Penn’s film, though it attempts to make us sympathize with a villain positioned against a civilized businessman who’s nearly as irredeemable. Two wrongs don’t make a right, so if anything, Penn’s adaptation of Thomas McGuane’s script is anarchist at best. Plagued with a troubled production thanks...

Pulp Fiction has become so canonized as a modern classic, it's easy to forget how transgressive it was on its release twenty years ago. But when Quentin Tarantino's film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1994, it thrilled and shocked the audience in equal measures.

'Pulp Fiction,' A to Z

No scene upended more expectations than the pawn shop sequence (Spoiler Alert — if you haven't ever seen the movie, this is the moment when you should stop reading and go do that. Really! It's streaming on Netflix!

Baltasar Kormákur's cross between Lethal Weapon and Charley Varrick makes for a slick thriller

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur and American TV writer Blake Masters demonstrate their admiration for Hollywood crime movies by bringing together versions of Murtaugh and Riggs, the cool, cautious black cop and the reckless, wisecracking white cop from the Lethal Weapon franchise, and the ingenious plot of Don Siegel's Charley Varrick. In Siegel's 1973 classic, Walter Matthau subsidises his daytime job as a crop-dusting pilot in New Mexico by robbing small banks, only to discover that a bank he robs for a few thousand bucks is holding several hundred thousand mafia dollars ready for laundering across the Rio Grande. In 2 Guns, Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg play undercover cops – their roles concealed from each other – who plan a complicated heist at a bank in South East Texas to entrap a Mexican drugs boss.

The target in...

Interview Duncan Bowles 14 Aug 2013 - 07:41

Ahead of his scene-stealing role in 2 Guns, Bill Paxton talks about auditioning, Edge Of Tomorrow, and playing Hudson in Aliens...

Bill Paxton is a legend. Here at Den Of Geek, he needs little introduction, as his work with James Cameron alone has been enough to secure his reputation as a cinema icon - from the small role as a punk in The Terminator, to the hysterical Hudson in Aliens, as well as a sleazy Simon In True Lies and a rather more grounded Brock in Titanic, there’s nothing he hasn’t excelled at.

While Paxton’s mortality rate in movies is high enough to give Sean Bean a run for his money – he has the dubious honour of dying by Terminator, Predator and Alien, although there’s some debate about whether his character dies during the T-800 scuffle - the beauty of his...

As we say in our review of 2 Guns, don’t let the film’s August release date fool you into thinking it’s not one of summer’s funnest rides. Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg star as an undercover DEA agent and naval intelligence officer, respectively, who’ve infiltrated a narcotics syndicate with the goal of bringing down drug kingpin Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos). The catch: Neither of them knows the other guy isn’t a real criminal until they receive orders to steal $3 million of Papi’s cash from a Savings & Loan but find $40 million more in the vault than they should.

Recent hot cinema topics such as the portrayal of the Mandarin character in Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 and speculations about what classic Star Trek villain Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in J.J Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness was modeled after leading up to the film’s release, among others, underline the importance of great villains in genre cinema.

Creating a great cinematic villain is a difficult goal that makes for an incredibly rewarding and memorable viewer experience when it is achieved.

We’ll now take a look at the greatest film villains. Other writing on this subject tends to be a bit unfocused, as “greatest villain” articles tend to mix live-action human villains with animated characters and even animals. Many of these articles also lack a cohesive quality as they attempt to cover too much ground at once by spanning all of film history.

This article focuses on the 1970’s,...

We love crime movies. We may go on and on about Scorsese’s ability to incorporate Italian neo-realism techniques into Mean Streets (1973), the place of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) in the canon of postwar noir, The Godfather (1972) as a socio-cultural commentary on the distortion of the ideals of the American dream blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda…but that ain’t it.

We love crime movies because we love watching a guy who doesn’t have to behave, who doesn’t have to – nor care to – put a choker on his id and can let his darkest, most visceral impulses run wild. Some smart-mouth gopher tells hood Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), “Go fuck yourself,” in Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), and does Tommy roll with it? Does he spit back, “Fuck me? Nah, fuck you!” Does he go home and tell his mother?

Nope.

He pulls a .45 cannon out from...

With four Grammy Awards, a Cable Ace Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, it's mind boggling to think that the legendary Lalo Schifrin is still without an Oscar, despite being nominated six times. The 80-year-old hasn't slowed down for a moment, with a catalog so vast that there is plenty for the devoted cinephile to explore and discover. And a holiday season treat is just around the corner. Aleph Records has put together a 4 CD box set that covers Schifrin's entire career, putting together a tracklist of selected film work as well as various jazz and classical pieces. Of note to film buffs will be prevoiusly unreleased pieces from Schifrin's work on the Don Siegel films "Charley Varrick" (an undersung little '70s gem), "The Beguiled" and "Coogan's Bluff" in addition to tracks from George C. Scott's "Rage" and John Sturges' "Joe Kidd." Of course,...

With the Academy Awards for the 2011 film year in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to take a look at one of the event’s most consistently fascinating categories: Best Supporting Actor. The most interesting story in the category this year isn’t who got nominated, it’s who didn’t. More specifically, Albert Brooks was completely robbed of a nomination for his performance as film producer turned lethal gangster Bernie Rose in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.

As much as I’d like to say I was surprised by this, considering both the quality of performance and Brooks’ slew of nominations from other critical circles, in light of the Academy’s history of overlooking outstanding supporting performances, I simply can’t.

Following is a chronological look at a number of performances richly deserving of a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination.

In some cases, the performances are in films...

In the credits to his masterpiece "Unforgiven," Clint Eastwood included a dedication: "for Don Siegel and Sergio Leone." Leone was a no-brainer, one of the great filmmakers who worked with Clint on a trio of films ("The Good The Bad And The Ugly," "A Fistful Of Dollars" and "For A Few Dollars More"). But Siegel was less beloved of cinephiles. A cosmopolitan Chicago native who studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, he started directing montages at Warner Bros. (including the opening scene of "Casablanca"), before breaking into features, with a string of B-movies with everyone from Robert Mitchum to Elvis Presley (the latter on 1960's "Flaming Star"), but became most notable for his work with Eastwood on five pictures from 1968's "Coogan's Bluff" to 1979's "Escape From Alcatraz."

Siegel was an unpretentious, unprecious director, best known for tough, muscular crime movies, but he never became an auteur favorite, despite his obvious...

Trailer for Jacques Audiard’s De rouille et d’os cites a May 17 release date. That’s one day after the Cannes Film Festival begins. (Thanks, Charley Varrick)...

0:00 - Intro 5:25 - Headlines: Sacha Baron Cohen Banned from Oscars?, Tugg, The Raid Title Change, Dwayne Johnson to Star in Hercules, Edgar Wright to Direct The Night Stalker, Jai Courtney is John McClane's Son, Weinsteins Boycott MPAA Over Bully Rating 24:00 - Review: Goon 53:40 - Other Stuff We Watched: Midnight in Paris, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, Wet Hot American Summer, Firecracker, Nightwish, Charley Varrick, Matinee, The Woman in Black, The 10th Victim, Willow, Life's Too Short 1:31:05 - Junk Mail: Reviewing Bad Movies, Letterboxd for Video Games, Interpreting Director's Intentions, Involuntary Audible Reactions to Movies, Africa Addio, Nostalgia and The Sandlot vs. Mighty Ducks, Mixing DVDs and Blu-rays from Different Regions 2:00:50 - This Week's DVD Releases 2:01:30 - Outro

Film Junk Podcast Episode #359: Goon by Filmjunk on Mixcloud

» Download the MP3 (57 Mb) » View the...

"Released in 1938 and now available in a remastered edition from the Warner Archive Collection, The Great Waltz was one of Louis B Mayer's frequent attempts to bring culture to the American masses by buying up wholesale lots of European talent," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. It's a "biographical fantasy woven, with no particular concern for the truth, around the figure of the Austrian composer Johann Strauss." And now out from New Yorker Video, "the 1975 film adaptation of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet stands in roughly the same relation to The Great Waltz as Schoenberg's dissonant, 12-tone compositions do to Strauss's infectious oom-pah-pahs. Schoenberg's unfinished opera is a work of the utmost sobriety and seriousness — a philosophical assertion of monotheism that confirmed Schoenberg's reconversion to Judaism — and it is presented by Straub and Huillet in a form that avoids any theatrical effects (or,...

John Flynn's Rolling Thunder is finally out on DVD. He may not have made enough films, says John Patterson, but when he did, the script came first

John Flynn's Rolling Thunder (1977), available this week for the first time on DVD, takes you back to a time when Hollywood still made grown-up medium-budget thrillers like Charley Varrick, Mr Majestyk or Jackson County Jail. Flynn died in 2007 and never made enough movies; this one reminds us how good he was.

Rolling Thunder was written by Paul Schrader and – like Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza, written by Schrader and his brother Leonard – it signposts themes and imagery that would obsess Schrader in his own movies: Vietnam veterans, samurai ethics, and orgasmic explosions of cathartically violent revenge. Oh, and horribly mutilated hands. POWs Rane (William Devane) and Voden (Tommy Lee Jones) return to Texas after years of torture in a Hanoi prison.

by Nick Schager

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the all-star Tower Heist, this week it's Don Siegel's Walter Matthau-headlined 1973 crime saga Charley Varrick.

"The Last of the Independents" is the tagline for Charley Varrick's (Walter Matthau) failed crop-dusting business—which was driven into the ground by big combine competition—and it's a description that aptly applies to the protagonist of Don Siegel's 1973 heist film Charley Varrick. Varrick is a man for whom the archaic ways—as both an entrepreneur and a stick-up artist—are threatened by a burgeoning corporate America defined by corruption and criminality. Based on John H. Reese's novel The Looters, Siegel's first post-Dirty Harry effort is a white-knuckle thriller equally indebted to film noir (in its fatalistic...

Chicago – From a classic tradition of abrasive-but-lovable anti-heroes, the lead of writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s “The Guard,” Officer Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), is one of the most memorable leads of the year. Played with trademark wit by Gleeson, Boyle does drugs, sleeps with hookers, and simply doesn’t care what you think about him. When a major drug deal is set to go down in his minor city, Boyle gets involved with an American agent played by Don Cheadle and a very unusual buddy/action movie unfolds. Writer/director John Michael McDonagh sat down with us last week to talk about Gleeson, Cheadle, Walter Matthau, Terence Malick, Ennio Morricone, “Game of Thrones,” and much more.

HollywoodChicago.com: The first natural question that people may have if they look you up on IMDb [and see that your last credit is 2003’s “Ned Kelly”] is why so long between movies?

John Michael McDonagh: In 2000 I made the short film. Obviously,...

The legendary composer does the iconic theme from that shark movie!

On our new DVD (you can win it right here!), Josh Olson does commentary on the trailer for Jaws, making some interesting points about the film and its iconic score. I won’t spoil the angle he takes because I’ve never heard it anywhere else, but it’s a fun bit of trivia.

Just like this, which the nerd gateway i09 reminded me of earlier today: Lalo Schifrin’s take on John Williams’ Jaws theme. This has been floating around out there for a bit — since 1976, actually – and comes from the Lalo Schifrin solo album Black Magic, which I’m hereby begging someone to send me. I first heard this a couple years and immediately put it on repeat. For about a week.

However, in light of Josh’s contribution to Trailers From Hell Volume 2 — which you...

I long for the days when Women in Prison flicks were a dime a dozen, and although they will never be made as often as they used to, Sugar Boxx is here to bring back that sleazy goodness from long ago! Francesca ‘Kitten’ Natividad has gone back to her roots after working with Russ Meyer in the 70′s on the skinsploitation movie Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.

Sugar Boxx hits DVD on March 15, 2011.

Sugar State Women’s Prison. An Everglades hellhole where innocent girls are forced to slave in the swamps by day then turn tricks for the warden by night. A prison camp where corruption, brutality, and sexual abuse are all part of the daily routine. But when reporter Valerie March goes undercover inside Sugar State, that’s when the powder keg really explodes! Follow Valerie through prison life – catfights, knife fights, rape, whippings, prostitution, and the “hot...

… but here's hoping they don't follow it with another duff comedy like Burn After Reading

It was always going to happen. As the climax of the Coen brothers' 26-year-long, sidling, digression-filled crabwalk towards the pure, distilled essence of Hollywood classicism in their film-making – which they first perfected in No Country For Old Men – the final obstacle facing them was the western, the greatest of all American genres. And now, with True Grit – which opened in the Us last month to rapturous acclaim – they have taken it, a genre oft-presumed deader than Custer and Crazy Horse, and given it back its heart, soul and teeth.

They've been pawing the sand with their hooves before the western for most of their creative lives; its forms and structures, its rites and rituals, and all its cultural and cinematic reverberations can be discerned throughout their work. No Country For Old Men is as surely...

For this edition Shadows of Film Noir, we take a look at Don Siegel's The Lineup, produced by the "B" unit at Columbia Pictures in 1958. It was unavailable for years, but Sony thankfully released it as part of the 2009 Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics DVD box set.

Behind the Scenes

Director Don Siegel was born in Chicago in 1912 and was educated at Cambridge. He landed a job as a "montage" director at Warner Bros., and made most of those little transitional sequences you see in Casablanca and the Bette Davis movie Now, Voyager. He made his feature directorial debut in 1946 with The Verdict, and continued making low-budget crime films (along with some Westerns and war films) -- including The Lineup -- for over a decade. His biggest hit from this period was, of course, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In 1960, he directed what many consider Elvis Presley's best film,...

With the release of Tony Scott.s Taking of Pelham 123, and the upcoming Michael Mann film Public Enemies, a lot of people are probably in the mood to check out more heist films (especially considering Scott.s isn.t very satisfying). By now everyone is familiar the big ones like Oceans 11, Heat, Dog Day Afternoon, etc., so here are some lesser-known but equally great films to satisfy your heist jones:The Taking Of Pelham 1 2 3 (Original 1974 version)Obviously the remake is going to raise everyone.s awareness of the original, so it might not be as underrated from now on, but it.s so good that it deserves all the promotion it can get. The plot is basically just like the remake; a grumpy pencil-pushing transit cop (Walter Matthau) is begrudgingly dragged into diffusing a hostage situation when a group of criminals led by mercenary Bernard Ryder/Mr. Blue...