Review – Smokey and the Bandit

This immortal classic is doubtless showing on all eight screens at the Hillbilly Heaven Octoplex. So if you’re feeling a bit of nostalgia for the CB-radio-talkin’, Trans-Am-drivin’, white-trash-livin’ days of the late 1970s, this will more than scratch your itch. Burt Reynolds cements his position as the high priest of trailer dwellers everywhere, with greater talents Sally Field and Jackie Gleason along for the ride. Though I got a chuckle or two out of the viewing experience, I don’t think the film-makers really intended for their magnum opus to amuse me in quite the way it did. The kitsch value – however unintentional – is hard to ignore, and if you’re lucky enough to catch this stinker on the tube then you’re in for some of the most awkwardly-censored dialogue you’ll ever see (I wish I had a buck for every time Gleason’s Bull-Connor-esque southern sheriff calls someone a “scum-bum”). Otherwise, however, this is little more than an empty-headed, virtually plot-free blast from a fortunately vanished past. See if desperate