Smokey and The Bandit was made in 1977, and there’s a distinct line between it and this year’s The Fall Guy, not least because Smokey was directed by a former stuntman: it’s the kind of film Ryan Gosling’s character would have spent a lot of his career making, a film propelled by a mix of stunts and a charismatic leading man rather than much in the way of plot or characterization.
The leading man here is Burt Reynolds, who plays a beer-running bandit trying to get a lorry-load of illegal alcohol to Georgia. This is not a plan the local cops are fond of, and they give chase with largely amusing consequences. The results are well worth watching on Netflix.
Is Smokey and the Bandit worth streaming?
Smokey and the Bandit is very, very seventies, right down to its attempts to cash in on the then-current CB radio craze. It has a very similar vibe to The Dukes of Hazzard and the original series of The Fall Guy: it’s a film where everybody’s clearly having fun and nobody is under the slightest misapprehension that they’re making great art. As Time Out put it, “the film’s enthusiasm makes up for its lack of ideas”: it’s “fast-moving but essentially lazy”. Think a 1970s Fast and the Furious and you’ve got the idea.
The movie is a great example of “they don’t make ’em like they used to”, both in terms of the thrilling stunt work – this was long before CGI available – and the lack of any real substance to the film: as The Hollywood Reporter says, it’s really a one-joke movie and while it’s quite a good joke (it revolves around the increasingly unhappy cops and their patrol car) there’s not much more to the movie than that: it’s a 97-minute chase that the Reporter described as “mildly entertaining – and totally mindless”.
It may not have the depth of the best Netflix movies, but it’s as fun as any of them, and a good way to start your week.