High Velocity (1976) User Reviews

So much more than a D-grade Rambo

[al_duke · 6/10 · 31 July 2012]

So, I'm watching this movie one afternoon on a day off. It's High Velocity, starring Ben Gazzara and Paul Winfield, as, I guess, former Special Forces operatives Cliff Baumgartner and Watson, respectively. They are soon contacted by Martel, played very slimily by Alejandro Rey, a sneaky executive of an unnamed "global corporation." The mission, should Baumgartner and Watson choose to accept: to rescue from captivity, the terribly loudmouthed, high-powered stereotypically American executive, Mr. Anderson, loudly played by Keenan Wynn (love that handlebar mustache of his, connected to some gigantic sidewhiskers! Gotta love the 70's!). Mr. Anderson was kidnapped from the polo grounds by a group of guerrillas, "the Gang of 45," led by Habagat, portrayed by Joonee Gamboa.

The Gang of 45 are not holding Anderson for ransom, but are doing so to make a political statement against corporate greed and imperialism. During the course of the film, we see the differences between rich and poor, from the beginning scenes at the polo grounds to all the scenes showing gritty city life, contrasted with the wealth and power of this unnamed "global corporation." Also, the stereotypical "ugly American" Mr. Anderson doesn't garner any sympathy from the viewer. Later, it is shown that Martel is sneakier than thought: he's also sleeping around with Mr. Anderson's trophy wife, played by Britt Eckland, and he's about to stab the mercs in the back big time!

It turns out that Martel plotted this whole thing simply to get Mr. Anderson out of the way and have Mrs. Anderson all to himself. Martel must ultimately take out anyone "who knows too much" —including Baumgartner and Watson! On the acting, I felt that Gazzara and Winfield played their parts of ex-Special Forces soldiers turned mercs quite well; both looked like they worked well together. Meanwhile, Rey was so sneaky and slimy here, I couldn't believe he's the same guy in the Flying Nun series!

I could easily have dismissed this as low-budget "Rambo wannabee" trash; if anything, what saved High Velocity from becoming a D-grade "commando" flick is the underlying social commentary about wealth and poverty. For me personally, because High Velocity was filmed in the Philippines during the 70's, I feel as if I am transported to the Philippines my parents knew. It's not exactly the Philippines I saw when I visited there ten years ago, but it's still the country I recognize.

I'll never forget where or Wynn I saw this.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 24 December 2020]

Going from the back lots of Disney to the Philippines, veteran actor Keenan Wynn gets to curse a lot, be really nasty and top his role as Alonzo Hawke and other assorted Disney villains. He's actually the victim here, an American millionaire who is kidnapped during a polo match (bonked on the head) after insulting practically everyone around them. For reasons known only to him, the equally aggressive Alejandro Rey hires Ben Gazzara to rescue him, and Gazzara is joined by a fellow agent (Paul Scofield) to rescue him which eventually we find out is politically based.

There's an interesting start to the Gazzara/Winfield dynamic which we find out quickly involves a bit of racism on Gazzara's side. Their fight ends up with them comically revealing that they're both out of shape which makes them start to work together. There's a sense of mystery as to who the abductors are outside a group of young college aged kids fighting for a cause and who exactly Rey is ang why Wynn was singled out. As he points out, if he's killed, someone is sent right into continue what he was doing before.

Obviously a low grade B film that managed to get a theatrical release, this has plenty of action but character development is inconsiquential in a quickly made action picture. This sets out to do what it intends, but it's one of those dusty old films that didn't get much attention when released and certainly on the video store shelves. I had a good time laughing at some of Wynn's lines, but it's surprising that he makes it as long as he does. Good location photography doesn't hide the cheapness, and it's one I can easily mark off my list as an unpleasant political thriller with not much at all memorable.

Ben Gazarra plays a Gun for Hire

[photoe · 10/10 · 29 January 2005]

This movie is completely unreviewed, and the first time I saw it was on late night TV in 1990. The likely reason it is so unknown despite starring Ben Gazarra, Paul Winfield, Keenan Wynn, and Britt Ekland is because it just has too much to say about capitalism and economic exploitation of the third world for an American audience. In the mold of Burn/Quemada, WHo'll Stop the Rain, Three Days of the Condor, this is 1970s post-Vietnam revisionism during its heyday.

The movie opens with Keenan Wynn enjoying the fruits of his servants labor in an unnamed third world country, though the movie was shot in the Phillipines. A highly visible and obnoxious wealthy foreigner, he is kidnapped by a local guerrilla group who soon demand a large ransom. Gazarra plays the man forced out of mercenary retirement to go rescue him when Wynn's multinational prefers not to negotiate or pay up.

Unlike the jungle justice films that appeared in the 1980s, this one employs a distinctly unresolved and unhappy chain of events as just about everything that can go bad does, and Gazarra finds himself in the worst case scenario he could've imagined reluctantly going in.

Despite this, it's not a preachy film, and Gazarra and Winfield's attack on the rebel base is well-planned and realistically executed action. What distinguishes this film is how it inserts little moments of unjust actions and tragedy to poison any fist-pumping moments or simple right/wrong analyses.

Gazarra doesn't only hurt people he might admire to save a degenerate who deserves to die, but it costs him everything as the best laid plans go awry. This movie says much along the way about masters, servants, colonialism as well as exposing a believable black humor among mercenaries, including a truly tragic and jarring parting of ways between the partners. I don't think it's an accident that it doesn't make any showings in the USA, and can only be found used on VHS. I'm still waiting for it to show up on the THIS channel. It has much in common with Wild Geese, but is even darker, if that is possible. In WIld Geese, the enemy is not sympathetic, In High Velocity they are better people than the villains and heroes both, although even they are flawed. You get a finale sense of the rank stupidity and confusion of violent conflict and how distant elites in the loftiest realms hold all the cards over the world.

There aren't many missteps in this film, except maybe B-grade film stock, which only adds to its mystique ultimately, but it would be nice to see a new transfer.

Better than Deer Hunter

[deniswheary · 8/10 · 18 September 2005]

I too stumbled on High Velocity years ago, at a drive-in triple bill or on late night TV, I don't remember which. What I do remember was thinking, "What the heck!!!?"

Lately I hunted down a VHS copy of this movie on e-bay and viewed it again. Perhaps my politics, or the times we live in, have changed sufficiently, because the plot doesn't seem quite so outrageous now as it did when I first saw this movie. Or maybe I've seen more films from Hong Kong, China & Japan ; I notice now that High Velocity was produced by Takashi Ohashi. In any case, the cast is excellent, with Ben Gazzara playing a likable and sincere ex- soldier, Paul Winfield as his crazy partner, Keenan Wynn, the big rich sweaty slob with a high voice, Alejandro Rey, a greasy bureaucrat, and Britt Ekland is, of course, the babe. I've read elsewhere that the original music was remarkable. This film itself is a bit dark and grainy, as if it was shot under exposed on 16mm stock and blown up to 35mm, but perhaps that just adds to the cheap look and trashy feeling of the whole sleazy enterprise, which is more appropriate for such tales than the usual gorgeous jungles of the popular war pictures .

As a Viet Nam veteran, I found High Velocity, which is set in the Philippines in the early 1970s, to be a better, truer picture about Americans fighting in SE Asia than Camino's "The Deer Hunter", Cappola's "Apocalypse Now" or Spottiswoode's "Air America" (gag!). If you like mercenaries/war movies about spooks killing and carrying on, check this one out.

Gazzara's Killing Of A Filipino Rookie

[El-Stumpo · 8/10 · 7 February 2011]

Taut, unexpectedly gripping mid-shelf thriller stars Ben Gazzara as Baumgartner, ex-Ranger Captain from the Vietnam War and now semi-retired crop duster in an unnamed, corruption-riddled military junta. He's trying to eke out his own little patch of paradise but the powers-that-be won't let him, as he's blackmailed by corporate snake Alejandro Martel (Alejandro Rey) into rescuing his company's repellent American CEO Anderson (Keenan Wynn) from a guerrilla stronghold in rebel-held territory. Killing's a business for Baumgartner and he's reluctantly back on the payroll, as his ex-Nam buddy, the equally jaded African-American Woody, and they both don the camouflage warpaint and head up the river -literally and figuratively - with a small arsenal of crossbows and explosives. Unfortunately for Anderson his head's full of corporate secrets, and Martel instructs Baumgartner to leave Anderson for dead rather than bring problems back home for him and his mistress, Anderson's listless wife Marie (Britt Ekland).

I call High Velocity "mid-shelf" as it appears to exist somewhere between an A and a B feature, with Gazzara (in Cassavette's Killing Of A Chinese Bookie the same year) giving his role class and grit in equal measures, and with the usually dependable Ekland, here little more than window dressing, providing the glamor. Eddie Romero's long-time collaborator Mike Parsons – as actor, co-producer and screenwriter throughout the Sixties – adds local flavor to director Remi Kramer's script, lending the film an authenticity: the cockfight, the drunken machismo, the omnipresent military (this WAS filmed during Martial Law, remember), and the requisite titty bar loaded on stage and off with doomed white expatriate faces. The character names are Filipino, the unsubtitled dialog's Tagalog, and-the-army versus rebels backdrop (for the so-called "Gang of 45", read the Philippines' communist NPA) is all too familiar to a Filipino audience.

It's an interesting smart-pulp improvement on the familiar "mercenaries rescue kidnapped Westerner from enemy territory" scenario, and not just because of Gazzara's gnarled, laconic delivery, and enjoyable dynamic and snappy banter between him and the as-gnarled Woody. For starters, our sympathies certainly don't lie with the Ugly American Anderson, played as a barking brutarian, vainglorious and vein-popping popinjay by an over-the-top Wynn, nor with his multi-national corporation, whose conspicuous extravagances are proudly on display. The opening polo match, from which Anderson is snatched, hammers the point home to perfection: polo-playing royalty inside their palatial walls, watched by their resentful, threadbare subjects through the gate's cell-like bars.

So do we cheer for the left-wing guerrillas led by Commander Habagat (Joonee Gamboa), themselves white-anted by corruption and desire for power, and all too eager to commit the ghastliest of deeds so long as they're sanctified by the noblest of motives? Or does High Velocity labor under the right-wing libertarian notion that the individual, and not the power structures that hold his true spirit in chains, can triumph? Certainly Baumgartner is only too happy to blast apart the rebels' huts to save his and his wife's skins, and doing the corporation's dirty work in the process; in High Velocity's unmarked hellhole, life is cheap, if not instantly disposable, and is ultimately measured by how strongly one feels the survival urge. Subsequently, there are no cheats nor sappy clichéd resolutions as the film hurtles towards its sour conclusion. Grim, satisfying stuff.

Two man merc team mount jungle assault, who'd want to miss that?

[actionfilm-2 · 9/10 · 6 July 2008]

High Velocity is a solid adventure tale of retired mercenary Clifford Baumgartner(Ben Gazzara) forced back into the trade and hired to rescue a wealthy businessman(Keenan Wynn) from a group of rebels who have kidnapped the abrasive old codger. The businessman's trophy wife and their lawyer coerce Baumgartner into accepting the job, so its off to the jungle for the merc and old associate/fellow merc Watson (Paul Winfield). Filmed in the Phillipines on a low budget the film manages to present an interesting social commentary of the contrast between the haves and the have nots. Of course there is enough combat in the film to warrant its promotion as an action themed film. The real appeal of High Velocity though is the chemistry between Ben Gazzara and Paul Winfield as the two man merc team who sign up for the job of assaulting the rebel group at their jungle base. Both actors were seasoned film veterans by the time this 1976 film was made, and their ease with each other on screen is apparent. Though their characters are comfortable working together at their trade, each feels different about their profession. Gazzara as Baumgartner is tired of the work and only takes the job after he and his family are threatened. Winfield as Watson is more comfortable with the mercenary lifestyle, taking a little too much pleasure in his job as a soldier of fortune. Though High Velocity is low budget and little seen, it remains a nice addition to the small group of films that make up the merc genre, such as Dark of the Sun, Dogs of War, and the Wild Geese.

High scale actionner

[searchanddestroy-1 · 8 November 2023]

In the seventies, there were batches and batches of exploitation, action flicks shot in the Philippines; batches, most of the time worst one than the other. This one is for me among the best, maybe because not of this common plot already made before and after, but the Ben Gazzara's performance, very different of what he did with his friend Jonh Cassavettes, very far from that. Here we are closer to DIRTY DOZEN than HUSBANDS...And Paul Winfield also shines here as Gazzra's pal, in this rather gloomy tale where there are not hero in the Stallone's craps style, for instance. I prefer this to FIRST BLOOD films series anyway. NO PROBLEM. Terrific downbeat ending, as I love. Forget Stallone's cheesy endings.