In Black Sunday, 70s superstar Bruce Dern plays Captain Michael Lander, a Viet Nam vet and former POW whose bitterness and rage has inspired, of all things, a plot to murder 80,000 people at the Super Bowl using the Goodyear Blimp as an explosive device! That President Carter will also be in attendance is, interestingly, not very high on the list of priorities for either the terrorists or the counter-terrorists. Has there ever been a President as culturally and historically irrelevant? Carter makes decades of obscure 1800s Presidents seem downright sexy by comparison. Man alive. Lander is assisted and funded by Palestinian refugee Dahlia (Marthe Keller) and her ragtag band of Islamic freedom fighters. On the side of Western dominance and aggression stands Robert Shaw as Major Kabokov, an Israeli Mossad agent who's spent the decades since his family died in the Holocaust hunting and killing innocent terrorists. The film does indeed present both sides of the struggle as morally corrupt and at least somewhat justified. Though Lander is absolutely nuts, Dern makes him a very sympathetic nuts, a politically neutral activist who longs to leave a big bloody mark. Dern has a series of outright great scenes ranging from manic excitement to murderous ennui to complete emotional breakdown. It's just plain great work from an actor I used to mock because I'd first seen him in the 80s B movie World Gone Wild, which I now understand says way more about my own deeply questionable taste in movies than Dern's quality as an actor. Dahlia is portrayed as a zealot of the heart, who lost her own family to the conflict, and regrets to inform us that death and destruction is necessary to achieve peace and brotherhood. Keller is decent if not terribly inspired in the role, but holds her own against Dern's rapid mood swings, and seems at times to be concerned that he's too crazy to be an Islamic terrorist. Shaw (most famous as Quint in Jaws) plays Kabokov as the diametric opposite to Lander—absolutely in control under all circumstances. He's as good, if not better than Dern, in a far more subtle role. The scene in which he briefly mourns the death of a trusted colleague is mind-blowing—his face shows no emotion, but a single intake of breath expresses more than a million hours of Tom Cruise flexing his jaw pretending to be trying not to cry. It was as satisfying as high-end softcore … I had to watch it twice. Recognizable character actors from 70s TV and film flesh out the cast, from William Daniels to Fritz Weaver to Ron Howard (in a bizarre cameo as Lander's wheelchair-bound, retarded son Ingo)! Their seaside picnic with stilted conversation and a near-tragic attempt at Frisbee® halts the movie midstream. Frankenheimer proves yet again that he's a master of the chase. The best one takes place through Miami, with an Arab dude running through crowds of old Jews singing the Israeli national anthem, shooting anyone in his way and hijacking several vehicles. Paunchy as he is, Shaw convincingly runs though these long, brutal chases, and even manages to look realistic dangling from a helicopter as he tries to stop the blimp from its fatal destination. Though at times deadly boring—apparently all 70s movies were required by law to have thousands of cutaway shots of bystanders eating ice cream – Black Sunday ratchets up the tension so that you really don't know what might happen in the final blimp chase. And you're even kind of hoping Lander and Dahlia will succeed, because you know it would be an awesomely cool scene to behold (way better than the delightful nuked-Super-Bowl in The Sum of All Fears). The film is so intriguing, well-acted, well-scripted, and convincing in its portrayal of terrorism, you almost think some kind of horrific terrorist act could actually happen inside America! Tough to believe, but I swear it seems possible.
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