So the next movie up on the podcast is this big ol’ piece of nothing.

Popeye Doyle, in addition to having the world’s stupidest name, is a dirty cop. Like, not in the sense of being down with the mob or anything, but just in the sense of basically beating randos up because he feels like it. He shoots people in the back, steals cars, engages in dangerous and destructive high-speed chases, shoots a fucking coworker dead by accident, gets tons of randos killed, etc.

Oh, and that chase is the thing that’s supposed to be all famous about this movie, where Popeye drives a stolen car down some road, racing against a train. It’s… fine. It’s nothing special. Like, even leaving aside modern CG, modern car stunts are just much better. It is, at best, 0.2 Fast and 0.35 Furious.

But really, most of the “chases” in this movie aren’t in a car — there are like three separate sequences where Popeye is ineptly tailing someone, managing to almost lose them while also not deceiving them about being followed at all. There’s one accidentally-hilarious scene where the dude he’s tailing gets on a train and Popeye follows, and then off, and then back on again, and it really needed a sad trombone as Popeye got left behind.

Combine a meh flagship stunt drive with tedious tailing scenes, absurd gunfights, a stupid plot, and annoyingly awful characters, and there’s little to recommend this movie. Its main virtue, tbh, is that it makes Taxi Driver seem a lot better by comparison.