The Movie: This is another one of those films that ended up in my Netflix queue due to my quest to watch every movie set in Las Vegas, and this one actually turned out to be surprisingly good, both for it's beautiful (and historic, by Vegas standards) location shots and also for the movie itself. It certainly turned out to be more than just the cheesy 80's action movie I was expecting.

This film stars Burt Reynolds as a bodyguard for hire (though he likes to call himself a "chaperone") who is dreaming about putting together enough money to run away to Venice, Italy. He also happens to be a master at hand to hand combat... and his gambling addiction is probably the primary reason why he can never manage to save up enough money to make it to Venice.

The plot goes something like this: A young attractive lady friend of his gets roughed up by some mafia types and pleads with Burt to work his magic and rough them up back so she can get some revenge. Unfortunately, this ends up getting Burt into big trouple with the mob types.

Meanwhile, a nerdy tourist played by Peter MacNicol hires Burt to be his body guard, but as it turns out, that's not the real reason why he hired him -- what he really wants is for Burt to teach him how to not be such a wussy nerd and instead be brave... and learn how to fight.

Overall this film surprised me by showing quite a bit more depth than I expected. When I started out it seemed like I was about to watch a really bad 80's action movie, but after a few minutes I realized that this was going to be a bit different. The middle of the film I thought was great, even clever, and I think the actors really brought a lot to the table here, really making this film better than it should have been.

Unfortunately in the end the film did end up degenerating into the cheesy 80's action flick that I was originally fearing, leading to a rather simplistic, predictable and unsatisfying ending to an otherwise decent film.

However a Vegas aficionado like me would be willing to overlook these shortcomings just for the awesome location shots in and around Vegas, particularly around Fremont Street and a bit of the Strip, though you do have to overlook the location continuity errors that are quite obvious for anyone familiar with the town. Of course, for practical purposes just about every movie has these sorts of issues, you can't really fault it for that.

One thing I can fault this film for is for having really bad editing. And I'm not just talking about the parts where they tried to do some special editing effects to make things seem excited. Particularly at the beginning of the film I was unfortunately quite acutely aware of the cuts being made because they just didn't flow well. Maybe it was because of poor camera positioning, or maybe it really was just the editing. Either way, it was quite distracting.

Despite its shortcomings, I ended up enjoying this film overall, and I recommend it (if you can find it!) if you're looking for some not quite totally mindless fun, or if you're a Vegas history freak like me.

The DVD: Ahh the technical aspects of this DVD. Where to start. I guess I'll start with the video transfer. You'll notice that I have the aspect ratio listed at 4:3 with no further comments. That's because I have no idea what the original intended aspect ratio of this film was, and IMDB was no help in this respect. It didn't seem like a pan and scan transfer (I didn't notice any obvious panning and scanning, nor did anything ever seem to be missing from the frame) but I also can't imagine that this was an unmatted full frame transfer of a 1.85:1 movie because cutting the top and bottom of the frame results in some pretty poor framing in a lot of the shots.

And while we're on the subject, the transfer wasn't very good at all. The dark parts were murky, the bright parts of the picture... not so bright, and there was an overall lack of resolution, enough to make it almost impossible to spot the original film grain of which there should be a considerable amount in a film of this vintage. Video quality also seemed to vary from shot to shot, particularly in the last 5 minutes of the film, but since it coincided exactly with the editing, I have to assume it was like that in the original film. It seems to me that this transfer was made from some sort of a video tape source (though nothing nearly as bad as say, VHS).

Basically what I'm getting at is that this is not a very good video transfer, though it wasn't quite as bad as the original DVD release of Scarface. The audio, basic as it was, turned out to not be nearly as bad as the video turned out to be and proved to be functional enough to not make me feel like I was really missing anything.

The only feature of this disc other than the film itself is chapter selection. It's about as bare bones as it gets, folks.

Overall... well if you find this movie in a $3.99 bargain bin or something, it might be worth your while, as long as you go into it expecting a cheesy 80's action flick because it really only offers barely more than that, unless as I mentioned before, you're a super Vegas nerd like me. But I certainly had a good time watching this film, and it was certainly far better than a lot of the garbage I've seen on my quest to see every Vegas movie ever!