SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

J Besser I was late to the table on this one. Shame on me. I first watched it on VHS when it was probably twenty years old (and I was thirty). It's tough and mean and insanely entertaining. A beautifully filmed meat and potatoes thriller. There's no gristle. It's everything you want in a thriller. Trust me, seek it out.

moonspinner55 "Charley Varrick", an adaptation of John Reese's book "The Looters", begins with a flurry of violent excitement: former stunt pilot Varrick, now using a crop dusting business as a front, robs a bank with his cronies in small New Mexico town. They only should have netted about two grand, but the quarter-million dollar haul they pick up raises a red flag. Varrick's first hunch turns out to be right, that the money was being held at the bank as a drop for the mafia, and "dirty" money can't be spent because it leaves a trail. Crime-drama directed by Don Siegel has a gritty panache that gives the picture character (it's better than your average bank robbery melee...and how could it not be with cagey Walter Matthau in the lead?). However, there's no trustworthy characters in the film--everyone is sleazy--including Varrick who, after a time, begins looking as crummy as the 'bad guys' who are after him. These are dirty deeds, all right, and the movie leaves unresolved sour feelings in its wake. Lalo Schifrin's instantly-dated score is overused by Siegel, carpeting the whole movie with perky noise. **1/2 from ****

radiobirdma Only someone who hasn't seen Peckinpah's sleazoid Getaway ('72) would play the amorality/ originality card on Charley Varrick ('73). Even for early seventies fare Varrick comes along as a quite tame, if not to say all in all standard affair, largely due to director Don Siegel's too-sure-of-himself tone and pace, the cocky tongue-in-cheek laidbackness mirrored in Walter Matthau's flat cool dude performance, Joe Don Baker's self-complacent travesty of a pipe-smoking mafia hit man, and the blunt (and unfunny) reference to Hitchcock's North by Northwest. Apart from the New Mexico setting, Charley Varrick would have served as an excellent episode of The Streets of San Francisco, Lalo Schifrin's soundtrack being right on a par with the stock beat of seventies television, though certainly not with Patrick Williams's virtuoso SoSF theme.

carbuff First off this is an anti-hero movie--if you need the good guys to win, this is not really your movie. This movie could be described as a more clever but less slick Quentin Tarantino film. I put this on because I had some friends over with their kids and the kids had seen everything new. I thought that an older, quality movie starring Walter Matthau (who they had never even heard of) might hold their attention, and it succeeded very well. I'm not the hardest grader, and if a movie simply leaves me with no regrets its already on its way to high marks from me. The production values of this film obviously don't match today's, and, of all of the performers, only Matthau's acting holds up well in hindsight. Strange as it sounds though, the dated performances of the other actors just added to the '70s atmosphere of the film, which made for terrific nostalgia for me. This is really a case of "they don't make them like they used to", and it's really too bad. Might be time to go back and watch some old Colombo episodes.