rollingthunder

This is another angry loner / revenge flick from screenwriter Paul Schrader ( Hardcore , Taxi Driver). This time, it's about a guy called Major Charles Rane, who's just come home to Texas after seven grueling years in a Viet Cong concentration camp. He returns to a heroes welcome, and is presented with a new cadillac, and $2500 worth of silver dollars ( one for each day he was in captivity). Things aren't looking too good on the homefront though. Rane's wife has left him for the local cop, and his nine year old son doesn't even remember him.

Civilian life isn't all bad though... Linda, the local good-time girl who works at the bar has a crush on him. Maybe because most of her ex-boyfreinds have done time just like Charles Rane has. She buys him a beer, and he has about a sip, and says he's gotta go (the wastage in movies always annoys me). He really isn't all that

interested in Linda, which is really bizarre, because I know that if I was locked up and tortured for seven years, I'd be a hell of a lot more interested than he was....after all, she wasn't exactly a horror like Whoopie Goldberg ! He returns to his wifes place , where he's staying till the divorce, to find a bunch of two-bit hoods in his house waiting for him. It seems they want the silver dollars that they saw on t.v. They can't be too ambitious, because there are about ten of them, and split ten ways the money ammounts to about $250 a piece. Charles refuses to tell them where the money is, and they start torturing him. After his experiences with the sadistic Viet Cong , this seemed pretty silly to me. Kind of like the cast of M*A*S*H* trying to pull off a remake of Apocalypse Now. After going through stuff like having a car battery connected to his testicles for all those years in Nam, Charles doesn't get affected by the beatings at all. Then the hoods try something the V.C. never thought of (but then again they probably had no electricity).....they shove his hand down the garbage disposal.

Pretty soon, Ranes wife and son arrive home. His son tells the bad guys where the money is, and is rewarded by being shot. Then they shoot Rane and his wife, and head for Mexico. Rane survives, unlike his wife and son. He is fitted with a prosthetic arm, which he sharpens on a grinder. Then he saws off his double barrel , loads his revolver, and heads to Mexico with Linda in search of some Travis Bickle - style payback.

Although it's not as punchy, or well made as other Schrader movies, Rolling Thunder is still pretty fun. I really liked how Rane used his prosthetic arm not only to reload his guns, but to disembowel , and nearly castrate as well. It also had one of the most wooden performances I've seen from the usually animated Tommy Lee Jones, as Ranes old Air Force buddy, who helps him blast the bad guys. This was pretty slow in places , and the ending was kind of anti-climactic, but if you like Paul Schrader movies you'll probably enjoy this.