Amazon.com video review:
Vince Majestyk (Charles Bronson) absolutely has to get his watermelon
crop
in, come hell
or high water, and nothing in the world is going to stop him. Trouble
comes, however, in the form of Bobby Kopas (Paul Koslo), who tries to force
Majestyk
to use a crew of winos rather than Majestyk's hand-picked migrant
crew. After Majestyk cleans his clock, Kopas swears out an assault
complaint, and soon the melon grower finds himself in the county
lockup. In jail he meets hit man Renda (Al Lettieri), and the two regard
each other
with hostility and suspicion. In a segment worthy of action director
John Frankenheimer, Renda's pals try to break him out of a prison bus in
a street shootout. Instead, Majestyk commandeers the bus and drives off
with Renda, with the intention of using him as a pawn to get the
charges dropped on himself…so he can get his melon crop in, of course.
The script for Mr. Majestyk was written by none other than Elmore
Leonard himself, and the rhythms of his hard-bitten prose are clear
throughout. As expected with a Leonard story, there are plenty of plot
flip-flops and more than a little tongue-in-cheek humor (the flinty
Bronson even gets a few of the good lines). A word of warning:
Vegetarians and those with sensitive temperaments may be disturbed by
the machine-gun slaughter of hundreds of defenseless watermelons, in one
of the movie's more sublime scenes. It's not great stuff, but
Mr. Majestyk is a fast-moving '70s action flick that doesn't take
itself too seriously and isn't above a blithely ridiculous plot device
or two. --Jerry Renshaw
