Arriving in Kingston after the death of his grandmother and sale of his home, a country boy named Ivan Martin (Jimmy Cliff) is immediately stripped of every possession he owns by a crafty thief. Ivan desires a life in the big city and all that comes with it - money, women, and especially fame - and is determined to stay no matter the obstacle. THE HARDER THEY COME is his story; a blood-boiling film of political, religious, and social revolution, backed by a reggae soundtracks that remains one of the best in history.

Co-writer, producer, and director Perry Henzell establishes Jamaican society as a place of crushing poverty ruled by corrupt authority. Desperate and broke, Ivan is given a place to stay and a meager job by the church, but he quickly finds existence under the Preacher (Basil Keane) oppressive and worthless. Promises of an eternal paradise after death are hollow to Ivan. What’s paradise worth if he’s too dead to enjoy it? He wants a little taste of it while he’s still alive.

Ivan’s salvation will come from music, not God. Ivan sticks to his dream of recording a song and finally convinces music mogul Hilton (Bob Charlton) to give him a chance. His song, “The Harder They Come,” expresses his frustration with all aspects of the controlling Jamaican society. It’s a great song, but Hilton, who controls the entire music industry, will only give Ivan $20 for it. Unable to get the song any attention without Hilton’s backing, he gives in. “I make hits, not the public,” Hilton tells Ivan. “I tell the DJs what to play.” Evidentially Hilton went on to a very successful career at ClearChannel.

His music dreams fulfilled but not lucrative, Ivan turns to crime where he encounters more corruption: while he is forced to assume all the risks, Ivan has to kick back most of the money he earns to his superiors in the drug trade. And just as Hilton owned the DJs, the dealers own the Jamaican police, who allow the drug trade to continue as a way of controlling the underworld. Eternally unsatisfied by his lot in life, Ivan is marked for death by the bigger dealers but manages to kill the policemen who are sent after him. Almost immediately, Ivan becomes a full-fledged murderer/media sensation. And suddenly “The Harder They Come,” his little forgotten song, is an overnight smash hit.

Like Arthur Penn’s BONNIE AND CLYDE, made about five years earlier, THE HARDER THEY COME links youth revolution with the actions of desperate blue collar outlaws who turn to crime as a way of making their fortunes and sating their lust for fame and power. Both films also feature key scenes in which their heroes go to the movies. In BONNIE, the Barrow Gang watched GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933. In HARDER, Ivan and his pals chuckle their way through a formulaic Western. The suggestion - one that I’m sort of cribbing from J. Hoberman in his book The Dream Life- is that these losers desperately wanted to be up on the movie screen, and by becoming murderers and media sensations they essentially turned their lives into movies. HARDER’s brilliantly constructed final showdown even manages to return to this idea through some clever flashback crosscutting that reminds us that heroes in movies in the period were very prone to dying in the final reel.

Henzell had only a fraction of Penn’s budget and a far more difficult production (shut down frequently by the Jamaican police due to the film’s dangerous political material). Authority in all its forms is corrupt, unjust, and ultimately pretty square. They control Ivan and his peers through the suppression of their ideas and their culture. His murders put him beyond the reach of authority; even if they can attack him they can’t stop his music, which is now too popular to keep of the airwaves. Or his movie, which was a huge international hit in 1973, and is still brutally relevant and coolly entertaining.

IF YOU LIKED THE HARDER THEY COME, CHECK OUT: THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1953), a John Huston film about soulful losers looking for a little taste of criminal paradise.

THE BAD

VIVA KNIEVEL! is bad, but I expected that. I didn’t expect it to be so tiresome though, and that is something I cannot forgive. It’s shocking to me that a movie starring Evel Knievel as himself, an aging Gene Kelly as his alcoholic mechanic, and Leslie Nielsen as the world’s most fiendish drug dealer could possibly be boring. Of course the movie is crap, but boring crap?

In an acting stretch, Knievel plays Evel Knievel, a famous motorcycle daredevil and flashy dresser from the 1970s. You’d have to be a daredevil to be brave enough to wear some of the lapels that Knievel sports in this film - wide is putting it mildly. VIVA opens with him sneaking into a church hospital in the middle of the night and passing out toys to all the sick children who are delighted to see their old pal Evel. One kid even drops his crutches and walks for the first time because he is so excited to see the daredevil! Evel also charms the nun who runs the place, whereupon she forgets her initial aggravation over seeing a man with huge sideburns repeatedly slapping the children’s faces to wake them up in the middle of the night when he gives her some fudge she likes. Is it wrong for me to enjoy hearing a nun say, “Darn you, Evel!”? If it is, I certainly don’t want to be right.

With these and other scenes of Evel holding court over his legions of youthful admirers, he is clearly presenting himself as a role model for children. We can all admire his kind treatment of orphans and his anti-drug policy, but I wouldn’t really want my kids to follow Knievel’s example. He frequently crashes his motorcycle, says he is retired then changes his mind, goes on a tour of Mexico purely for monetary gain, and even breaks into a mental hospital on his cycle. One laborious subplot finds Will (Kelly) struggling to become a father to his son Tommy (Eric Olson). Knievel allows and even encourages the adolescent boy to ride a motorcycle, despite his father’s objections, so long as he wears a protective helmet. Naturally the boy crashes and falls and nearly kills himself. That Evel’s a hero all right. That’s like Hulk Hogan popping steroids while pushing kids to “take their vitamins.”

Leslie Nielsen’s unnecessarily complex scheme involves luring Knievel to Mexico, killing him in a stunt, then creating duplicates of Knievel’s gear caravan, hiding drugs inside the vehicles, and then bringing it all back across the border to Mexico. As you might guess, the plan does not go well, and that allows for a finale that involves cars, trucks, motorcycles and the outer limits of my cinematic patience. The strangest part is the moment when Evel finally realizes the evil (or “evel”) scheme he is caught up in but chooses to change his clothes (into a hideous orange jumpsuit) rather than pursuing the crooks. Evel didn’t think things through; dressing like a neon road construction sign when you’re trying to quietly sneak up on an armed caravan with hostages isn’t exactly the definition of “subterfuge.”

We could debate whether Evel Knievel jumping a distance on a motorcycle is interesting, just as we could debate whether auto racing is interesting. Those are matters of taste and personal preference. Unquestionably though, a semifictional film of him doing it is far less interesting in any case because we know he’s going to make each jump. And if he misses a jump, we know he won’t be hurt or killed because it’s a movie, it’s staged, it’s fake. If Evel Knievel died making this movie, I wouldn’t be able to rent it because it would have never been released. Watching the stunt footage in VIVA KNIEVEL! is as exciting as NASCAR would be if all the drivers were in bumper cars. With all this buildup to these underwhelming jumps, I nearly fell into a coma trying to finish the film. You’ve heard the phrase “The suspense is killing me.” VIVA KNIEVEL! creates the need for a variation: “The lack of suspense is killing me.”

INSTEAD OF VIVA KNIEVEL!, CHECK OUT: TORQUE (2004), this year’s FAST AND THE FURIOUS style biker film (not to be confused with last year’s BIKER BOYZ), which features a hilarious kung-fu cat fight on motorcycles. Knievel wishes he was that creative.

THE UGLY

The opening credits of POINT BREAK make perfectly clear what sort of story you are about to watch. Shots of a surfer riding big waves are cut with Keanu Reeves in the pouring rain, shooting a gun thirty-five times without reloading his weapon. Hence for the rest of the movie, shooting and surfing are combined for 122 minutes in ways that make “The Simple Life” look like Ulysses.

Johnny Utah - yes, Reeves plays a guy named Johnny freakin’ Utah - is a green FBI agent assigned to the bank robbery detail in Los Angeles. When a string of robberies carried out by guys in masks of ex-presidents is linked to surfing, Johnny has to go undercover in the world of the big wave. But Johnny, poor, dumb Johnny, is easily duped and he quickly becomes enamored with the people he’s supposed to be spying on. When asked what appeals to him about the surfer lifestyle, Johnny mumbles, “I’m drawn to it. Or something.” Another time he tells his love interest Tyler (Lori Petty), “I can’t describe what I’m feeling!” I’ll just bet you can’t, Keanu.

That’s just the sort of philosophy espoused by POINT BREAK, where dumb surfers talk dumb in ways that makes them sound smart. Johnny is particularly keen on the stoned, quasi-philosophical ramblings of a surfer named Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). He is a “modern savage” with a head of hair desperately in need of conditioner and a good brushing, but in the worldview of POINT BREAK he is a visionary. Here’s a sample of the man’s so-called insight: “This was never about money for us, it was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something to those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins. We show them that human spirit is still alive!” Not in this movie, it isn’t.

You’ve heard of plot holes? Well, POINT BREAK is all plot hole. Johnny Utah (and the actor who plays him) may very well be the worst undercover agent in history. He uses his real name when he introduces himself to Bodhi and his crew, and since he was a famous football player in college, it makes him a very easy man to dig up information on. BREAK also features a scene where it is pitch black night on the beach while simultaneously it is dawn in the water, and another where it is pouring rain on the beach and sunny in the ocean.

Worst of all, POINT BREAK and its characters are vastly dumber than its audience. It takes Keanu Reeves over an hour and one very bad lead to realize the surfers who have shown him the way are, in fact, the same guys who are robbing banks. The audience realizes it almost immediately. Once the characters are laid out we can guess pretty quickly who will live and who will die (and in what order) and exactly where and how the film will end. But the plot drags on and on while Johnny Utah, the Inspector Clouseau of the FBI, very slowly puts together the pieces of a case similar to the kind of jigsaw puzzle you used to do when you were in kindergarten.

Look, Keanu Reeves has a reputation as a pretty bad actor, and if anything, POINT BREAK proves that it’s not entirely unearned. But he has, in THE MATRIX films and SPEED, made some improvements that deserve mentioning. Unfortunately, here he acts like playing an undercover surfer dude would actually be a stretch; and it would be for his character, but not for Reeves, who practically defined the California surfer dude delivery. POINT BREAK contributes to the world of ugly movies by having one of the best ugly casts of the ‘90s, including Reeves and Swayze, along with Gary “Butthorn” Busey, and by paying so little attention to plot continuity it may as well have transplanted the final act of the film the Swiss Alps. It wouldn’t have been any less ridiculous that than what wound up on the screen.

IF YOU LIKED POINT BREAK, CHECK OUT: THE SKYDIVERS (1963), an ineptly made skydiving movie from master of ugly cinema Coleman Francis. Featured on one of the very best episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.