With a great cast comprised of Charlton Heston, John Cassavetes, Beau Bridges, Martin Balsam and Gena Rowlands, Two-Minute Warning sucks us into a story about a sniper who positions himself on a football stadium before the championship game between Los Angeles and Baltimore is about to start. As he is spotted by a blimp camera, the police and SWAT team are called in and start devising a plan of capturing the killer before the game ends. However, realizing he’s surrounded by the authorities, the sniper opens fire and wreaks complete havoc on the stadium.
Based on George LaFountaine’s novel of the same name, Two-Minute Warning is a 1976 action thriller directed by Larry Peerce with a screenplay written by American film and television writer Edward Hume. With the majority of the film shot following the 1975 football season at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Peerce’s film achieved solid box office results and was called by Roger Ebert a “cheerfully unashamed exploitation of two of our great national preoccupations, pro football and guns”. It seems some critics had a problem with the authors’ intentional decision not to shed any light on the killer’s motives, but the exclusion of a backstory makes the experience even more traumatizing and terrifying.
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