5.6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Tucker is serving a prison sentence for murder. A secret agency helps him to escape so that he can murder a person in a latin-American country. But Tucker only wants to escape, not to kill somebody.
Starring: Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen, Richard Widmark, Mickey Rooney, Edward AlbertThriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono
None
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Note: This film is currently available only in this double feature: The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle
.
The seventies are often perceived to be a decade of unbridled creativity in film, an era when a new generation of
filmmaker
eschewed the now largely dormant studio controlled system of production to craft more personal stories, often in rather
idiosyncratic ways. However, any objective parsing of the decade’s releases more than proves that old ways die hard,
and
behemoth retreads were still being foisted on the paying public with great regularity. Shout! Factory has been releasing
some interesting double features on Blu-ray over the past couple of years, with sometimes tangential connections
between the two films. Their latest offering, pairing 1976’s The Cassandra Crossing with 1977’s The Domino
Principle, is another kind of “strange bedfellows” duo, joined mostly due to their release year proximity as well as by
the perhaps unintended fact that each of them attempts to revisit genres that had already been mined more effectively
in
previous (better) films. The Cassandra Crossing is a big budget, “all star” disaster movie which came along at a
time when the disaster genre was already showing signs of precipitous decline. The Domino Principle is a
paranoid
political thriller that attempts to examine an all knowing, all seeing shadowy group of operatives that enlists unwilling
assassins, and so is a throwback to all sorts of films like The Manchurian Candidate, The Conversation and The Parallax View. Both of these films have
certain commendable aspects, though neither ever rises to any considerable level of greatness.
The Domino Principle is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Timeless Media Group (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While this release suffers from some of the same issues troubling its sibling The Cassandra Crossing, this is the better looking of the two transfers. Colors, while just a bit faded looking, are noticeably more vivid and robust, and fine detail is actually quite excellent in several close-ups. The biggest issue facing this transfer is recurrent density issues which create a kind of quasi-flicker. Unfortunately this tendency actually gets worse as the film goes along, making the last half or so somewhat problematic. This is not a deal killer, however, and anyone who is a fan of the film should be reasonably pleased with the look of this high definition presentation.
Likewise, The Domino Principle's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix does not have the same distortion issues that hobbled The Cassandra Crossing. Billy Goldenberg's score sounds fine, as does the dialogue. The low end here is a bit on the anemic side, meaning some of the effects like a recurrent helicopter and gunfire aren't quite at the bombastic levels modern day audiophiles would prefer. Other than that anomaly, however, this track sports very good fidelity and reasonable dynamic range.
The Domino Principle has a few reasonably tense moments, but its hackneyed screenplay ultimately sinks this enterprise in a morass of silliness and faux hysteria. Kramer does what he can with the material, and the actors are all game, but this is one film most viewers will want to put out of its misery even if they're not being manipulated by some super-secret shadow organization.
(Still not reliable for this title)
Special Edition
1967
Nuclear Countdown
1977
1950
1974
Warner Archive Collection
1964
Limited Edition to 3000 - SOLD OUT
1941
1955
1967
1932
1990
1952
1965
1975
1946
1943
Gunmen on the Loose
1955
Deluxe Edition
1949
1954
Reissue | Special Edition
1948
1976