The Last Chase (1981)

People are voting emotionally.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Am I Missing Something?

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

I only have myself and my ridiculously high expectations to blame, of course, but "The Last Chase" was one of the biggest disappointments in years! Here I was hoping to see a tremendously cool car chase motion picture, in the same style as "Vanishing Point" only in a futuristic and thus even more desolate setting. In other words, a virulent and adrenalin-rushing road adventure in which one awesome hero gets chased by an increasingly larger army of dim-witted cops that continuously crash their cars or drive into ravines. Well, like sadly far too often in my life, I was wrong. "The Last Chase" is a dull and moralizing – almost prophetic – drama about the true definition of freedom and blah blah blah. The year is … um, I forgot already, but it's the not too distant future and the new fascist government prohibited all forms of private transportation due to the scarcity of oil products. Franklyn Hart used to be a racer, but now he's assigned to go from school to school and preach about how the 1980's were barbaric times. During a moment of clarity, however, he fixes his hideous old car (I think it's a Porsche) and heads out to California along with a rebellious teenager. The authorities naturally cannot allow this, but they don't have any means to stop Franklyn, so they hire an 80-year-old war veteran and his antique F-86 Jet to stop him. Let me assure you, it's a truly ludicrous sight to see a Sci-Fi movie using scenery from the Korean War. This could have been a great action/adventure flick, but instead became a boring and talkative drama with too much pretension. Lee Majors clearly craves back to the successful days of "Six Million Dollar Man" and Burgess Meredith, although vivid and outrageous, looks just as antique as the plane he's flying.

I remember seeing this film at the theater with Robin Williams' Popeye" as afternoon double feature movie matinée when I was kid. This was low budget Canadian film marketed as American film (Lee Majors made a couple of Canadian movies like this in early 80's such as Agency with late Robert Mitchum) The shortage of oils leading into ban of automobiles, epidemic wiped out the populations, and people are forced by government to live in suppressed society with ridiculous rules and restrictions. The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors, plays former race car driver who rebuilds his Porsche that was hidden underneath of his garage and breaks free to California where people are start living in free society like used to be. Former World War jet fighter played by late Burgess Meredith is after him to kill. This movie has so much potentials and a good plot , but it gets lost or misguided to make a solid movie. It just failed to develop those interesting issues/setups/surprisingly great characters into some what successful movie. However that didn't stop this movie to become fun/enjoyable vintage guilty pleasure low budget sci-fi action flick. Movie stardom hungry Lee Majors with mullet, wearing silver racing jacket (I think stunt man, Mike, from recent Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof might be got the idea from Lee's character, Frank Hart. Well, looks wise....) did his own car stunts with red Porsche racing car. The cross country chase between Porsche and jet was all old school stunts, and it also captured beautiful Denver/Rocky Mt. No CGI on this!!! This movie also features Chris Makepeace from My Bodyguard and Vamp. I really like to see this movie available on DVD sometime soon!!!

This is like four nine-year-olds sitting around discussing who'd win if Jesus and Superman did battle. Or a horrible novel I read years ago that went to great pains to engineer a climactic battle between a polar bear and a great white shark, in front of paying spectators.Here, it's a battle (and no, this isn't a spoiler, the "battle" goes on for seven or eight hours) between a Porsche Group One racer and a Sabre jet (misidentified throughout the MST version as a Phantom). To set this up, you have to get into a whole Battlefield Earth thing of ancient jets and racecars running on magic fuel that can sit around for decades in abandoned fuel storage tanks that the pilot and driver can find across the entire US but which somehow escaped detection throughout all the bad years of chaos when They turned the oil off.Then you get into the Final Sacrifice zone, where the non-hardware stuff in the movie just kind of happens because it's got to or the movie couldn't lurch forward, eh? Roads are clear and well-maintained after years of disuse, soldiers move swiftly around the country in (presumably) animal-powered transport, the entire US is polkadotted with remote TV cameras at apparently hundred-foot intervals, even though there's no vehicles to drive out and service them AND NOTHING FOR THEM TO MONITOR ANYWAY YOU DIPSH... OK, I'm better now. And an ancient golden city doesn't rise up out of an Alberta wheatfield, so I guess it isn't as bad as it COULD be.****SPOILER****Of course, the Sabre Jet and the Porsche never actually do anything more than roll/drive towards each other, once. Nor does Chris Makepeace put on a Merry Widow and purple eyeshadow and do the Time Warp with Lee Majors, either. So I'm not clear on what Last Chase was supposed to accomplish. Nothing much happens, nothing makes a lot of sense, subplots sprout, wither and die without ever seeing the light of day...I've got it! This was intended as a screen-saver for your TV! Canadians, being a judicious and parsimonious race, will suffer not the slightest risk of losing a perfectly good television to burning-in, so create movies like this to keep the screen phosphors occupied and happy! It was never INTENDED to be a "movie," for godsake!Whew. I feel much better now, having figured this all out.

Stupid, mindless drivel about a jet assembled within hours by mechanics who have never worked on airplanes (piloted by Burgess Meredith) chasing a Porsche race car which runs on decades-old gasoline sludge, driven by Lee Majors, with Chris Makepeace as the runaway techno-wiz who can McGyver spare parts into a radio receiver which can pick up all frequencies simultaneously, and who somehow learned how to acquire and use chemicals to make high explosives in a perfectly peaceful society. As moronic as it sounds. Terrible waste of Burgess Meredith, but Chris Makepeace may at least be forgiven on the grounds that this was only his second film.