The Sugarland Express (1974): Spielberg's weakness on full display

The Sugarland Express, 1974, directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal Studios 4K blu-ray (2024), 2 stars.

A swing and a miss for Steven Spielberg in his first theatrical film. I really disliked this movie, found it really frustrating. I was pretty much checked out about two-thirds of the way in, just waiting for it to end.

The movie looked great, as all Spielberg's movies do. We got a couple or three decent action set pieces. But other than that, The Sugarland Express just sat there spinning its wheels.

The Sugarland Express, based on a true story, has Goldie Hawn breaking her husband out of jail to help her reclaim their young daughter from the foster system. The couple carjack and kidnap a state trooper, lead dozens of squad cars on a slow-speed chase across Texas and become folk heroes in the process.

It's an exciting premise to start. But the movie never seems to gain any real momentum before it devolves into over-the-top silliness.

I think a big problem is that Spielberg really didn't have a clear idea what he wanted to do here. Did he want a crime procedural? Did he want an over-the-top action movie? Did he want a light comedy? A character study, perhaps? It's like he brought all these different elements with him, mashed them all together and came out with a gloppy mess that didn't really work on any front.

Another fault is one that plagues most all the Spielberg films I have seen -- his characters generally aren't very good. It's the big reason why I've never really been a fan of his movies, which I usually always see as technically brilliant but substantively weak. Almost all Spielberg characters are folksy, charming, good-humored, pure-hearted cutouts who are either brilliantly wise or incredibly dumb -- or sometimes both, depending on the needs of a given scene. 

If you don't have a giant shark or flocks of dinosaurs or cute aliens or spaceships to hold your attention, the human characters in Spielberg films just make me cringe. Watching The Sugarland Express, I learned where that trend started.

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