I miss the Clint Eastwood who directs and stars in The Gauntlet: the one who shoots a gun and has fistfights. The one who wasn’t interested in chasing Oscar gold with mediocre melodramas of butch boxers, county bridges and apartheid rugby. The one who’s second or third line of dialogue is simply, gruffly, “Fuck ’em.”
As cop Ben Shockley, Eastwood is given the plum assignment of escorting an escort from a Las Vegas jail to a Phoenix courthouse so she can testify in a case against a rather feared mobster. Shockley would rather be drinking, and the manly named hooker, Gus (Sondra Locke), considers her chaperone to be a “big, .45-caliber fruit.”
Before they even depart her cell, Vegas bookies are betting against Shockley even completing the assignment, eventually placing the odds at 100-to-1. As the story progresses, one can see why, as Shockley has to protect Gus the huss from a horny constable (Deliverance‘s Bill McKinney, forever may he make us squeal), a hippie biker gang, snipers in a helicopter and the titular gauntlet of Phoenix’s finest, blowing bullet holes into the bus Shockley steals on their final stretch, after crudely welding a driver’s seat capsule of armor.
While its comedic bits could be tempered, The Gauntlet is a merry, if minor movie of mayhem Eastwood sandwiched in between Dirty Harry outings. Its slightness in story is mitigated by an almost tireless pace — slowed only by a motel stop for Locke to bathe — and plenty of the ol’ boom-and-pow. By that, I mean explosions and the trading of gunfire, not some sexual euphemism. Speaking of, for a then-real-life couple, Eastwood and Locke share zero chemistry, and what’s with him putting her in all those rape scenes? That’s not a recipe for lasting relationships. —Rod Lott
This is a guilty pleasure for me. It not realy a good movie for all the above reasons but it has a great ending with all of the cops trying to kill both of them. Also it become part of a pair of movie are similar but different. It this case I team up The Gauntlet with Bruce Willis Film 16 Blocks. If I see one of them, I pull down the DVD of the other to watch.
Yeah, I used to enjoy catching this one on TV way back when… Although I always thought it would’ve worked better as a Dirty Harry flick. Still, good old fashioned mindless nonstop action.