Good start, but then it gets ruined

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Absolutely brilliant

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

In a fuel-starved future, the totalitarian government has just impounded all private vehicles. Twenty years ago, the world was ravaged by a mysterious disease. Race car driver Franklyn Hart (Lee Majors) lost his family during the epidemic. Hart is now the spokesman for the mass transit system. He is being investigated for breaking into the impound lot and in danger of re-education. Ring (Chris Makepeace) is a hacker anti-authority boarding school student. Ring goes on the run from the police and gets Hart's help to drive to "Free California". The government has to stop this symbol of personal freedom. They bring out Vietnam vet Captain Williams (Burgess Meredith) and an F-86 Sabre jet.This is a rally for driving freedom in response to the speed limit. There are a couple cool things in this movie. However at its heart, it's a non-sensical cheesy Canadian production. I like the operations room although I wonder if it's recycled from another movie. The world in the movie makes little sense but the idea of the freedom of the road is very appealing. Burgess talking to his plane is kind of funny. The movie probably needs more comedy and not the unintended kind.

Following a lethal plague which has wiped out millions of people and a severe oil crisis that has caused driving to be outlawed, an authoritarian government has come into power and set up restrictive, rigidly enforced codes of proper conduct that have made individual freedom a thing of the past. Stubbornly rebellious former race car driver Frank Hart (an appropriately stalwart and rock-like Lee Majors), frustrated with the fascist society he can't comfortably acquit himself to the stifling dictates of, decides to drive his red Porsche to the still liberated California, taking equally recalcitrant electronics whiz kid Ring McCarthy (winningly played by Chris Makepeace) along with him on a perilous trek across America's desolate abandoned highways. Shrewd regime toady Hawkins (finely essayed to smug'n'smarmy perfection by George Touliatos) assigns batty old ace Air Force pilot J.G. Williams (a delightfully spunky Burgess Meredith, howling like a crazed bloodhound and clearly having a grand old time mugging it up) to track Hart down and kill him.An on-target celebration of rugged individualism and a frightfully prescient pre-90's prediction of mass bureaucratic conformity taken to a hideously repressive extreme, "The Last Chase" really cuts it as a rip-roaringly exciting and effective futuristic sci-fi/car chase action thriller movie ode to "stand up to the Man and to hell with the System" status quo defying rebellion and independence. Director Martyn Burke (who co-wrote the nicely thoughtful script with Roy Moore and C.R. O'Christopher), aided by Gil ("Blood Beach," "The Manipulater") Melle's jaunty, swelling score, keeps the pace rattling along at a crisp, steady tempo, occasionally pausing for moments of quiet introspection and character development which ensure that the film has plenty of heart to spare (the rapport between Hart and McCarthy is especially breezy and appealing). Moreover, this feature's portrait of a seriously uptight, anal retentive, overly rule conscientious no-fun near future society has uncanny parallels to nauseatingly stuffy 90's political correctness, thus giving the picture a topicality and resonance that's sadly still quite timely even today. An extremely good, pleasingly provocative and rather scarily prophetic science fiction film.

First of all, it has a great score by Gil Melle. He did cool synthesizer stuff with stuff like The Questor Tapes and Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and he doesn't disapppoint here. Even at the dullest moments, you can count on the score to give you a jolt or two.The main problem is that everything in this movie is just...slightly off-key. Give it a better actor than Lee Majors as the "hero," and a better old fogey/jetfighter than hammy Burgess Meredith, and do a little more than just rehash Farenheit 451 with gas instead of books, and this might have worked. Chris Makepeace is okay (although the juvie bad boy/computer hacker stereotype was already overdone by '81), and the plane vs. car action sequences aren't too badly done.*shrug* I liked it. It wasn't better than Cats, but otherwise it works for me.

Seeing a movie like this gives me a feeling deep in my bowels that someday, I might become an action movie hero. This is an incredibly horrifying movie about the future that could be. I was compelled to watch this movie from front to end, hoping that somehow this movie could get cheesier, and my wishes came true. It is great to know that once an incredibly bad movie gets worse, that it comes out on top again as an entertaining vision of our fears as they were in the early-Eighties.