Cinema: Banana Fields Forever

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FIREPOWER

Directed by Michael Winner

Screenplay by Gerald Wilson

This is Michael Winner's annual exercise in violence and stupidity. The brutality, by the standards of the director who brought us Death Wish and The Sentinel, is relatively mild. It lacks his usual slavering interest in gore, grotesquery and sadism—though there is one signature episode in which a man is tortured by being doused in blood and dunked in shark-infested waters. One must add, however, that Winner has perhaps exceeded him self in witlessness.

The plot is raveled. It revolves around the U.S. Attorney General's office, which employs the Mafia to find a cool freelance hit man to abduct a Robert Vesco-like tycoon from his extradition-proof Caribbean hideaway and return him to face justice back home. This effort is complicated by many subplots, romantic and otherwise, all of them dismally predict able, all of them stretched to transparent thinness. James Coburn, Sophia Loren, OJ. Simpson and a quite decent group of character people are involved in this non sense. One pities the lot of them, but none more than Loren. a great star stumbling around in yet another of those starlet roles she has inexplicably been taking lately.

The film is shot with a clumsiness that often falls over the line into incompetence, and the general lack of conviction acts like a shot of Novocain administered to every frame. "Seal off the banana fields!" someone cries in the midst of the final chase, but, aside from that choice addition to the world's treasury of silly movie lines. Firepower is entirely lacking in entertainment value.

—R.S.