Positively uncomfortable watch due to the main character’s point-of-view that it presents. In spite of its uneven acting and having some filler scenes, the film has a weirdly quick and nice pace to it leading nonetheless to a predictable 70’s style ending.

Joe (Peter Boyle), a racist, misogynistic, homophobe, nationalist and violent blue-collar worker starts an unconventional friendship with Bill (Dennis Patrick), a wealthy and conservative white-collar big fish, after the latter confides with the former the fact that he has killed a man. The initial remorse that Bill may have had over his actions will quickly turn to a sense of justice once Joe convinces him that the junkie and drug dealer that he just killed was a parasite to society.

The most remarkable element from this film is the courage and dare of the film to put us looking the world through the eyes and mind of a truly despicable man: Joe. The 70’s popularised the figure of the anti-hero, misunderstood misfits who although being flawed were fighting against a stronger evil than themselves (from small-time criminals to corrupt corporations or politicians), but the particularity of this film is that Joe (and actually also Bill) are not heroes nor anti-heroes but full-fledged villains. They are the bad guys; they are the bad guys at the beginning, and they still are at the very end. Their motivations are the criminal ones and even if they drive themselves to believe of being fair and just people fighting the decadence of the current state of the United States of America, the truth is that their actions are completely unjustifiable and are targeted to completely innocent people (even the drug dealer at the beginning gets a punishment far too extreme to his wrongdoings).

Peter Boyle is perfect as Joe. From the very first scene in which he frantically yells slur after slur while drunk in a bar, he is quickly perceived as the deranged man that he unravels himself to be. It cannot be said the same for the rest of cast, whose performances are quite weak, including that of Dennis Patrick, his scenes together with Boyle are salvable, but this is because the second carries them. In the rest of scenes, whether his alone or with his wife Joan (Audrey Caire), he simply does not click. Susan Sarandon, in her first film (playing Bill’s daughter), shows the potential that her future would confirm, and K. Callan as Joe’s wife is fairly amusing. But, overall, all acting could be better.

Besides the aforementioned point-of-view, the truth is that the Academy Award nominated screenplay written by Norman Wexler feels quite both weirdly tedious and vivacious at the same time. That occurs by a strange synergy between the constant jumping from one set piece and setting to another which provides for quite several scenes that feel completely dismissible but concurrently, this constant jumping allows for an enough quick pace in which this filler scenes do not last enough as to start annoying you making you wonder when we would move on from them.

The other debatable element from the writing maybe is not as much his fault but a problem of the times in which the film was made. The same way anti-heroes were a thing, depressing and pessimistic endings were one of the other rules and unfortunately this makes possible for the audience to predict the ending for this movie from a mile away. It would have been nice to see Wexler being capable to give his personal twist to this preconception, the same way he does it with the anti-hero idea. That does not mean having a pink and flowery happy ending but at least maybe something that would not follow the conventions of the time so clearly.

At the end of the day this is undoubtedly a curious watch. It is not often that we get so deeply under the skin of the villain making audience members nauseous and uneasy for having to share close to two hours with these types of guys. This is not meant to drive you away from watching the film, on the contrary it actually becomes both interesting and entertaining for its unusuality. On the other hand, what can in fact distant yourself from this film is its mostly poor acting (some dramatic scenes are so bad that you actually laugh) and some disputable choices in the writing which make for some bland and unnecessary sequences.