Customer Reviews

Special Delivery [VHS]

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Okay, this 1976 movie--"Dangerous Break" aka "Special Delivery"--is certainly no masterpiece, but it's really entertaining anyway.

First and foremost, the acting is uniformly terrific. You've got the wonderful Cybill Shepherd in a role that couldn't be more up her alley, and she works it to the hilt, supplying the movie with her trademark charm and sly humor. As for Bo Svenson, I've seen this guy get ridiculed mercilessly in regard to his acting ability; he does a great job here though, delivering a convincing and, for the most part, slyly laidback performance.

Svenson plays Jack Murdock, one of four guys who were all Marines in the Vietnam War together. After the war, with several of them having suffered drastic injuries, as well as having trouble on the job front, they decide to rob a bank. While making their getaway, one dies, and the other two are arrested, and in an act of desperation while running from the police, Murdock hides a bag containing $500,000 in a mailbox. Cybill's character, Mary Jane, happens to witness him put the bag of money in the mailbox from her apartment window, and she proceeds to take him under her wing, not just for the money, but due to her attraction to him as well.

The movie rolls along really intriguingly and arrestingly, but it eventually does start to fall apart, with a bunch of eyeroll-inducingly far-fetched plot turns. The scene were Murdock beats up three guys in an adult movie theatre is baffling. The movie overall is actually quite clever, but it seems that the screenwriters were at a real loss as to how they could have the character's primary dilemmas resolved in a convincing manner, and the movie's cliffhanger ending is amusing, but in a rather laughable way. All that said though, this is a highly entertaining movie, containing some genuine tension. Solidly recommended.