• Decades before L.A. Confidential Curtis Hanson wrote this very clever screenplay
  • It is a game of cat and mouse between the crafty, yet peculiar Elliot Gould character, and the menacing Christopher Plummer character.
  • Gould’s character isn’t one you see often in these types of films (the entire film zigs when you think it is going to zag)- it is refreshing- he’s no victim and he’s not macho either. He reads the principles of chess and collects exotic fish.

Plummer’s eyes (complete with mascara, eyeliner)—terrifying- in several long scenes he makes a point of not blinking—in a few scenes turning very gruesome and violent

an early credit for a young John Candy as an employee at the bank– and I get a laugh out of her shirt as a bank employee

  • Both Toronto (the bank branch is in the Eaton Center Mall—1978 a big year for malls with this and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) and Christmas (Plummer playing a bank-robbing Santa) a character in the film
  • Recommend but not in the top 10 of 1978