Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974, Michael Cimino)

Tiring, glib, pointless action/comedy about an old thief (Clint Eastwood) and a young thief (Jeff Bridges, a terrible performance from a reliable actor) who attempt to rob a vault in a Montana town. Well, that's what happens about an hour into this thing, the previous sixty minutes being a character piece without any characters. At times, the gorgeous Widescreen Montana countryside and rambling narrative make it look like a road movie/Western, like Butch Cassidy or Two-Lane Blacktop, but it lacks the wit and strong structure of the former and the (admittedly, hard to repeat) Beckettian rigor of the latter. Instead, it tries for a slice-of-life, then-this-happened folksiness, but the results are contrived wackiness. (The worst scene features a character that picks up the hitch-hiking duo, who turns out to be crazy and carrying rabbits in his trunk, all for no good reason). And the weird gay subtext (Eastwood and Bridges "meet cute" in an action context; Bridges constantly talks about their relationship, and makes baiting passes at George Kennedy, the villain) is interesting, but I'm not convinced Cimino put it in there for anything other than cheap yuks. The climactic heist is adequately entertaining, and I get a strange pleasure from watching regular cars leave the pavement and drive off-road (see also: Badlands, Moby's "Porcelain" video), but then it ends on a "bittersweet" note that it did absolutely nothing to earn, in the process looking like a parody of the 70s downer ending. Bonus points for Gary Busey, Vic Tayback, and Burton Gilliam; points taken away for doing nothing with them.