Product Description

A NIGHTMARE OF FEAR AND PANIC UNFOLDS AS A LONE GUNMAN SETS HIS SIGHTS ON A SELL-OUT CROWD AT A CHAMPIONSHIP FOOTBALL GAME. BONUS FEATURES: THEATRICAL TRAILER, FEATURETTE, TALENT BIOS, PRODUCTION NOTES, AND WEB LINKS.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50386 in DVD
• Brand: UNI DIST CORP. (MCA)
• Released on: 1998-12-15
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 126 minutes

Amazon.com
Unfairly dismissed by a number of critics, Two Minute Warning is an absorbing contemplation of the phenomenon of violence. Based on a novel by George LaFountaine, the story concerns an anonymous (and, until the very end, faceless) sniper perched above the scoreboard at a championship football game in Los Angeles. His lack of identity and unstated motivation is key to the film's air of cautionary fable, in which the killer's rage is one end of a continuum that includes many different kinds of violence among numerous characters: emotional withdrawal, police brutality, subtle racism, chips on various shoulders. Produced in 1976, the movie has all the hallmarks of the decade's vogue for disaster flicks: an ensemble cast, a web of story lines, and a lot of people contained in one place where something awful happens. But it is also something more: a successful exercise in plastic storytelling, a clever interweaving of a dozen discrete subplots with a mix of documentary and original action footage. The explosiveness of the football game itself becomes a refrain of ritualized mayhem in director Larry Peerce's patchwork film, but without beating us over the head with its metaphorical obviousness. Two Minute Warning may not be a great or classic work, but it is far more than the sum of its many parts and does leave a lasting impression. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

"the whole place is a kill-zone"
Filmed in and around the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, this often absurd but always entertaining thriller will be enjoyed by those like me who have an affection for '70s action/disaster movies like "Airport", and the many that followed it.
This like the other films follows the usual formula in the first half by giving us a glimpse into the lives of the participants, which the net of fate reels in for the grand finale, and Charlton Heston and John Cassavetes have a slew of excellent actors to back them in these many parts, like Martin Balsam, Beau Bridges, Gena Rowlands, and even Walter Pidgeon as a pickpocket.

The plot starts with an unidentified sniper killing a cyclist from a hotel window, and then moving to a rooftop location in the stadium, where a championship football game will be played to a sold-out crowd. One of the more realistic parts of the film is how the screaming, cheering crowd is oblivious of what is happening around them (some of it amusing if one has a dark sense of humor), as I'm sure would be the case if this event occurred in real life.

In our age of terrorism as the "war of our time", films like this spark the imagination, and make one wonder how this sort of situation would be dealt with in a crowded stadium; there's no doubt that chaos and mayhem would be the inevitable result.
Another interesting aspect is how times have changed in 30 years as far as security for the president and other officials; in the last few decades, one of the things that has changed the most in the world is the size of its governments, and films like this bring that fact into sharp focus.

Fantastic cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld in the last part of the film, a score by Charles Fox that adds to the tension, and fast-paced direction by Larry Peerce make this a good film for rainy weekends and '70s disaster fans. It received a 1976 Oscar nomination for Best Editing, and total running time is 115 minutes.
DVD extras include Production Notes/Cast & Filmmaker's Bios/Film Highlights/Theatrical Trailer/ Web Links.

Superbowl Sniper
I was recently trying to recall some of the better disaster movies that came out of the Sixties and Seventies. Two that stood out in my mind was "Black Sunday" and I couldn't recall the name of the other but I recalled a sniper shooting people at a championship football game and S.W.A.T. trying to stop him. I was interested enough in tracking it down that I went to imdb.com and did a search on the word sniper in the plots. When I saw the title "Two Minute Warning" more started to come back to me. The cast is good, but not all of them do much more than cameos. But some performances are quite good, like that of John Cassavetes. The tension, camerawork, and music are excellent. It is intense watching the S.W.A.T team try to stop the sniper without starting a panic at the stadium. Although they eventually get the sniper, he racks up a sizeable body count, especially once the stampede of people try to exit the stadium. I couldn't help thinking of cattle when I saw it. This may not be up to some movies of today, but it is still well worth owning. I recommend it to anyone that likes action movies, especially police related. The movie was popular enough at the time to help bring about the S.W.A.T. TV series.

It only takes one sniper...
It only takes one sniper to cause mayhem at a jam-packed Los Angeles Coliseum in this terribly underrated film that was wrongly tagged as an assembly-line disaster pic or a violent big-budget exploitation film. TWO-MINUTE WARNING gets good performances from leading actors Charlton Heston, Martin Balsam, and John Cassavetes in this well-made suspense thriller of police forces trying to stop a mysterious psychotic sniper from shhoting into a crowd of between ninety and one hundred thousand at a championship football game in the Coliseum. The film concludes with a horrible stampede of panic and horror that has all too accurately been repeated in real life in European soccer violence.

Although it has certain melodramatic elements and an all-star lineup (Brock Peters, Gena Rowland, David Janssen, Jack Klugman, etc.), TWO-MINUTE WARNING mostly avoids the pratfalls common to the disaster genre. And the climax, while indisputably violent (earning the film its 'R' rating) is never strictly speaking an overt case of blood and gore. And like Steven Spielberg with the psychotic trucker in DUEL, here director Larry Peerce decides to keep the sniper's identity a secret (until the end).

Since TWO-MINUTE WARNING is on both DVD and VHS, there is now no longer any need to see the butchered, watered-down version that ended up on television. It is in the original director's version that this film should be seen; it is well worth it.