Three top stars of the blaxploitation genre team up for Three The Hard Way. Despite some serious flaws, it isn’t hard to find fondness for the end results.
Three top stars of the blaxploitation genre team up for Three The Hard Way. Despite some serious flaws, it isn’t hard to find fondness for the end results.
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#1 by Galaxyjane on October 21, 2014 - 7:25 pm
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Of course the evil plan from this was lifted wholesale and dropped into the middle of “Black Dynamite”. I quite like “Three the Hard Way”, it actually turned up on local TV not too long ago. I declared a two hour break in the kids homeschool day and glued myself to the tube, I’m afraid.
#2 by RogerBW on October 23, 2014 - 3:29 pm
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I suspect that most discerning film-watchers score “big TV ad campaign” in the same box as “not screened for critics”, but what I think we’ve seen over the last forty-odd years is a gradually-increasing realisation that there are films where you don’t even need to pretend to be trying to appeal to the discerning film-watcher, and you can still make lots of money. (The current Transformers series is the poster child for this, obviously.)
Ego problems are not new. In The Towering Inferno Steve McQueen and Paul Newman both refused to relinquish top billing. The answer: diagonal credits! http://phdblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/towering-inferno.png But 1974 was still the prime “box picture” era, when having a bunch of at least medium-sized stars was still a plausible thing to achieve.
From the plot description, it sounds as though the filmmakers missed out on one classic trick from superhero comics: get Big Star A to fight Big Star B when they first meet, and then they team up against the real enemy.
#3 by blake on October 23, 2014 - 6:49 pm
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Keith, how good was the hand-to-hand combat in the film?
Also, apparently there was a Spaghetti Western made starring these three called TAKE A HARD RIDE, although it doesn’t seem to have been as good as this.
#4 by Greywizard on October 23, 2014 - 8:17 pm
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Blake, I actually wrote the review many months ago and just now got around to putting it up, so my memories of the movie are now fuzzy. But I am confident that if I had found the hand-to-hand combat in the movie to be bad, I wouldn’t have hesitated to state this in the review. If you look at my past reviews of movies involving hand-to-hand combat, I have been quick to criticize cinematic martial arts I consider to be below par.