Verdict
Summary
From Sam Peckinpah, Convoy is a pretty simple story that goes completely over the top with a wildly violent climax (no surprise, coming from the guy who made The Wild Bunch), but the movie has a goofy happy ending despite the insanity that came before. When Ernest Borgnine mounts up on a heavy duty mounted machine gun like Rambo and turns Kristofferson’s truck into Swiss cheese (in slow motion, of course), you know you’re entered an alternate reality of cinematic excellence.
Plot:
A grudge match between a renegade trucker and a corrupt sheriff crosses state lines and into the public eye.
Review:
Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald (Kris Kristofferson) is the king of the road in his 18-wheeler, and he’s got friends in every town and girls at every truck stop who know his name and his game. He also has a mortal enemy in a corrupt sheriff who goes by Cottonmouth (Ernest Borgnine, appropriately slimy). The truckers basically pay the sheriff’s toll (pure graft) whenever they ride through his county, but when Cottonmouth gets offended at some chatter about him over the CB radio, he pulls off in a truck stop to ply some more graft from Penwald and the other truckers … except, this time, they aren’t gonna pay! They beat the crap out of the sheriff, and when some other trucker-hating cops show up, they beat them up too, all but ensuring that the truckers will do hard time for what they’ve done, and with Penwald ready to run, he grabs the nearest gal (played by curly haired Ali MacGraw), and off they go on the run from the law! Word gets out that Penwald is leading a non-stop convoy across state lines in a protest against the corruption of the law, and soon a scuzzy governor (played by Seymore Cassel) takes advantage of the situation to make all the media coverage about the truckers a great time to campaign for reelection. The media makes a circus out of the convoy, but things get really dicey when Cottonmouth goes completely over the top with a military-style brigade to obliterate Penwald before he crosses state lines.
From Sam Peckinpah, Convoy is a pretty simple story that goes completely over the top with a wildly violent climax (no surprise, coming from the guy who made The Wild Bunch), but the movie has a goofy happy ending despite the insanity that came before. When Ernest Borgnine mounts up on a heavy duty mounted machine gun like Rambo and turns Kristofferson’s truck into Swiss cheese (in slow motion, of course), you know you’re entered an alternate reality of cinematic excellence. Convoy was one of a whole bunch of trucker action films – with titles such as White Line Fever and Breaker Breaker, to name a few – from the 1970s that made American truck drivers into average guy heroes, and this one might be the biggest and the best of them. Kick up some dust!
Kino Lorber has just reissued Convoy in a three-disc set with a 4K Ultra HD disc, a Blu-ray, and a bonus features disc, and special features include three separate audio commentaries, a documentary, a video essay, deleted scenes, image galleries, four featurettes, and more. The image quality of the new 4K scan is as sharp as you’ll ever get on home video, and I have no complaints whatsoever of the presentation.