Two-Minute Warning

A truly excellent and engrossing affair, and one where the book's origin is very, very evident (and very, very good). It’s sort of a precursor to the even more successful Black Sunday, which John Frankenheimer released a year later. Larry Peerce, a mostly TV director who is not very well-known, was as good as his more famous colleagues. The tension is omnipresent, and if you see the film for the first time, you can't be at all sure what will happen in the next minute; the sniper remains virtually faceless and anonymous from beginning to end, but we get to know a lot of other people in the stadium, whose mini-stories come together in a perfectly terrifying (or terrifyingly perfect) finale. Great, great, great! The only complaint I have is how late (without any explanation for the delay) the helicopter appeared on the scene... But that's really a minor flaw. __P.S. (31/03/2013)