Duck Soup

By Frank Rich

CONVOY

Directed by Sam Peckinpah Screenplay by B. W.L. Norton

Convoy, which seems to be Sam Peckinpah's uncalled-for remake of Smokey and the Bandit, is roughly as much fun as a ride on the New Jersey Turnpike with the windows open. It not only numbs the brain but also pollutes the senses. Though Peckinpah has made a distressingly high number of turkeys in recent years, his new effort is surely in a class by itself. This time the director doesn't even bother to reward his hard core fans with some gratuitous violence or mean-spirited sex.

Kris Kristofferson, a fine actor who has worked well with Peckinpah previously, plays the starring role of Rubber Duck, a laconic, independent trucker who leads a convoy of fellow drivers on an endless protest trek across the American Southwest. He is a typical Peckinpah hero, a macho embodiment of oldtime frontier values. Early on he hitches up with a Peckinpah heroine -- a bitchy, citified photographer who is hungry for a Real Man. For some reason, Ali MacGraw has emerged from unofficial retirement to play this demeaning role. Peckinpah shows his gratitude by shooting her synthetic facial expressions in humiliating closeup.

Convoy's script, based on C.W. Mc-Call's bestselling pop song, rarely flirts with logic. The dialogue, which is glutted with CB-radio slang and western-movie cliches, ranges from the absurd to the subliterate. We never understand why Rubber Duck's nemesis (the congenitally irate Ernest Borgnine) is after him or what the truckers' grievances are. What's worse, we don't care. Next to this muddleheaded film, F.I.S.T. starts to look like a dynamic political manifesto. Peckinpah tries to enliven the nonsense with slow-motion automotive stunts and barroom brawls, but these signature sequences just do not have the energy of the director's best work (The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue) or even his worst (The Killer Elite, Bring Me the Head of Al fredo Garcia). At one point the film's hero announces that "the purpose of the convoy is to keep moving"; maybe so, but if Convoy has any purpose, forward movement is not it. -- Frank Rich

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