12/14/10 - The Warriors

The Warriors (1979, 92 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080120/

The Warriors makes up the second half of the double feature. Circle of Iron was enjoyable every once in a while for its silly comedy and for some of its action but it still got a poor score. This was reminiscent of the last double feature where King Kung Fu was a poor start but Tuff Turf was an okay second film. I was hoping The Warriors was pretty good.

The film follows a gang called the Warriors. A large meeting is held in a park in New York City for all the gangs where one leader named Cyrus (Roger Hill) attempts to get all the gangs to group together so as to control the city. After he's shot, a member of the Warriors is wrongly framed and so the movie follows the group as they attempt to get back to their safe haven at Coney Island. There's a huge group of kid actors making up the Warriors gang (and the other gangs they meet) so I'm not going to name names.

I was struck with a John Carpenter vibe from The Warriors. Maybe it was just that it reminded me of Escape from New York (which was actually made later) but the dark city and the score for the film both seemed to come out of a Carpenter movie. When I mentioned this to the group no one really agreed with me so maybe I'm alone in this feeling. Anyway, this was a good thing since Carpenter is a solid director. However, it was really in atmosphere alone as most of the other aspects of the movie weren't as great.

For one, I never was really engrossed in the movie. Sure, it was fun to watch this gang attempt to escape back to Coney Island and see how they got past each group they encountered but I never really got to know any of the members and I never was rooting for anyone. Yeah, I guess I wanted the Warriors to survive as a group but I was never really sucked in to rooting for them if that makes sense. This was not really a fault of the acting as almost all the kids did a fine job. There were a bunch of them though so no one placed themselves head and shoulders above the rest but no one was so bad I wanted them to stop either. For a movie carried by about twenty kid actors, that was the best I could hope for so the film did succeed there.

The Warriors is a bit of a picaresque and I usually enjoy this type of film so again it's hard to place exactly what I didn't like. Each group that the Warriors run into is distinct and this is fun. The baseball gang was probably the coolest and the fight with them was pretty good as well. It ran a little long but that was okay. The end fight with the Rogues was somewhat lacking as it was over way too quick. Sadly, though, at this point I was essentially ready for the movie to be over so this was both good and bad.

I think what The Warriors boils down to is the fact that it never wowed me in any way. It was enjoyable but even at 92 minutes it was getting boring near the end. There was no pizzazz or super exciting moment that held me captivated. I basically just watched it for 92 minutes and then was done. In the same vein, there was nothing in The Warriors that made me hate the film either. Each scene was well enough - nothing great but nothing poor.

Overall, I gave this film a 5/10. The Warriors is a cult classic and it's a film worth watching. Compared to Circle of Iron it came off looking pretty splendid but looking at it by itself it was just average.