★★½
“Hard to give a truck.”
After her truck-driving husband is injured in an attempted hijack, Sweetiepie (Darby) finds herself in a bind. They’re way behind on payments for the truck, to the point that it’s about to be repossessed by C.W. Douglas (Stanton) of Vehicle Retrievals Incorporated. In desperation, she hires experienced driver Flatbed Annie (Potts) to partner with her, working the necessary delivery routes to pay off their debt. However, Douglas is not the only threat the pair face on the highway. The failed hijack was intended to recover a package which has surreptitiously been placed in the truck during a run to Mexico, and its owners remain very keen to recover their merchandise from the new operators,
It’s a TV movie, so you know that means it’s going to be well short of the necessary wallop, especially considering the late seventies era from which this dates. In reality, the mob would have no hesitation in using more direct methods to take their property back, with Annie and Sweetiepie lucky to escape with their lives. Here, the criminals are bumbling, comedic figures who pose no threat and, in fact, are all but forgotten during the middle stages. It’s also remarkable how Sweetiepie picks up the ability to drive a 16-wheeler in only a few hours, considering she was previously a county clerk. Training. It’s clearly vastly over-rated… Mind you, if you’re looking for vehicular mayhem, you’re in the wrong place anyway: an unnecessary citrus avalanche is about as close as this gets.
On the positive side, the case here is better than you’d expect. You may remember Darby from the original True Grit, and Potts would go on to Ghostbusters. The chief delight though is Stanton, playing a repo man a full five years before his iconic turn as a repo man in… um, Repo Man. His character here is an affable sort, considering his profession, who rarely lets anything faze him, playing the guitar as he drives. Indeed, he’s quite the musical talent, at one point whipping out his harmonica to deliver an impromptu rendition of Scotland the Brave, for no apparent reason. The film comes to life any time he’s on-screen, and if this had spun off into a series (as the ending implies was hoped), I’d have watched.
As a stand-alone entity, however, it only barely passes muster as entertainment. The initial set-up is fine, the problem is a script which has no idea what to do with the scenario beyond reaching its end point. Questions such as how the package came to be in the truck, for example, are glossed over in little more than a single sentence, and that entire subplot is not so much resolved as discarded. There are nods to the brotherhood of the road, with other truckers helping out our heroines, an idea likely borrowed from the previous year’s hit movie, Convoy. Like most other elements here, nothing of more than marginal significance results.
Dir: Robert Greenwald
Star: Kim Darby, Annie Potts, Harry Dean Stanton, Arthur Godfrey