Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		2.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Gone in 60 Seconds Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman January 12, 2017

Mill Creek has released the fan-favorite rough and raw and very exciting 'Gone in 60 Seconds' to Blu-ray, a release in competition with the Anderson Merchandising disc from 2012. Mill Creek's disc features a "restored and remastered" 1080p/MPEG-2 encoded transfer, a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, a few supplements, and what appears to be a first for Mill Creek, a digital copy of the film.

The original 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds is really quite something else. Half drive-in B-movie with little in the way of engaging plot or characterization and half an immensely fun and unusually well done extended car chase movie, it's a classic of the genre that spawned a grossly inferior remake but, that movie aside, holds up as an icon of its era and one of the great automobile films of all time. It's practical, raw, and rough. Every bit of twisted metal, crash, spin, roll, whatever happens in the movie just feels right. It's really the definition and draw of event cinema, seeing something that's tangible and practical and larger than life, dangerous, and gritty, but at the same time believable, like the audience really could be one of the innocent bystanders in the way of the mayhem. No smoke and mirrors, just real rough-and-tumble car chase action that, once it gets going, leaves everyone forgetting about the almost mismatched opening half or so on display.

Of course, the movie is hopelessly dated today in terms of how richly it captures its era, but it otherwise remains a breath of fresh air in a time of overly slick and enhanced movies, and in some ways seems to work better today than it did several decades ago. Writer/Producer/Director/Actor H. B. Halicki reportedly put the film together on the cheap (Google will tell all), and it's a masterwork of relatively low budget but extremely competent and effective filmmaking. Halicki keeps things simple, managing to maintain audience interest in the movie's cruder and lesser first half and then hitting the accelerator -- literally -- in the second. The stunt work is practical and believable. It doesn't feel unnaturally fast, inorganically staged, or anything of the sort that so often plague lesser "car" movies that bank on the one or two million-dollar shots rather than present a lengthier, though rougher yet more refreshing and believable, long-service event that benefits the film much more than a couple of one-off wonders. It's a movie that blends charm with crudeness and thrives on its rough edges and realism. It's a blast, hopelessly dated wardrobe and dramatic emptiness considered and included.

For more thoughts on the film, see the Blu-ray.com review of the 2012 Blu-ray release here.

Gone in 60 Seconds Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Gone in 60 Seconds has been "restored and remastered" for this Blu-ray release and is presented in the MPEG-2 format (which has been Mill Creek's codec of choice for a couple of the studio's other recent releases). The image isn't quite pristine, but it's an honest one. Grain is rather thick throughout, but at least it's retained. Purists will be delighted, clean-filmers will be angered. Even at its density, it's attractive and beneficial to the movie's tone and texture. Detailing is fairly substantial, and all of the movie's textural cues remain intact rather than smoothed over by unnecessary noise reduction. Grimy garage surfaces, fine-point clothing lines, scrunched and twisted metal, mars on paint jobs, wear on car interior surfaces...the image reproduces all of the movie's texturally intoxicating elements with a precision becoming them, sure to please film fans everywhere. Soft focus and borderline smeary shots populate a few scenes throughout, though such are clearly soft at the source. Colors are attractively neutral, never sparkling but popping with a pleasing balance in all of the various car shades (red and yellow seem predominant) while multicolored period clothes and urban accents all appear grounded and firm. Black levels can be rather absorbing and prone to heavy crush, with a few nighttime shots devolving into a soupy morass of dense crush with only a few dots of light (headlights, street lights, etc.) breaking up the black. Flesh tones appear accurate enough. Small pops and speckles dot the print and wobble and flicker are apparent here and there, all representing the core drawbacks on display. It's certainly not a "restoration" or "remaster" to the absolute highest standards, even considering some of the source's inherent limitations. For a budget release, though, it's hard to find significant fault with the end product.

Gone in 60 Seconds Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Gone in 60 Seconds revs up on Blu-ray with a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Lip sync appears off for much of the film, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot. Otherwise, it's fairly well prioritized and entrenched in the center (save for a few moments of wider reverberation, such as during a sequence inside a garage in chapter five) but does suffer through some inherent shallowness at times. Music enjoys a fair push out to the sides and yields decent raw clarity, capturing the spirit, tone, and detail of the score well enough. There's decent heft to machinery and the low end adds some depth to bits of the music, too. Various crashes and crunches present well enough, and the various chase sequences bring some much-needed and welcome movement to the mix as sirens wail from one end of the stage to another and cars slip and zoom with an honest sense of movement. The track has its pluses and minuses, though between the lack of an original or lossless option as well as the problematic syncing, it tends to favor the "minuses."

Gone in 60 Seconds Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Gone in 60 Seconds begins with an introduction (480i, 2:24) from Denice Halicki that covers her husband's passions, the film's realism, and stunts. In-menu extras are listed below, but note that the selections are much smaller than what's included with the Anderson Merchandising release. A Mill Creek digital copy code is included with purchase.

• Trailer (480i, 1:30).
• Interviews (480i, 31:26): Interviewees include Lee Iacocca, Parnelli Jones, Jim Dilamarter, J.C. AgaJanian, Jr., and Bobby Ore.
• Rare Footage (1080i, 15:49): This (mostly) soundless feature offers about eight minutes of first-person driving footage, followed by some raw footage of some of the car chase sequence in action as well as a few other bits (with some sound) at the end.

Gone in 60 Seconds Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Gone in 60 Seconds holds up as a pretty cool little movie, less for its drive-in first half doldrums and more for its raw and tangible and very inspired car chase sequence in the third act. It's great stuff even by today's whiz-bang standards, practical and particularly digital alike, besting much more polished material precisely because it's anything but. Mill Creek's Blu-ray is decent enough. Even with the MPEG-2 video encode, the video presentation is rather attractive. The 5.1 lossy audio is fair but marred by a lip sync issue. The release contains a few supplements, too. The lip sync issue was not reported in the review of the Anderson Merchandising release, which, along with a wider range of bonus content, is probably the way to go for this movie on Blu-ray.