Grand Theft Auto (1977)
Directed by Ron Howard
A rich girl steals her dad's Rolls Royce and heads off to Las Vegas to get married. However, her angry parents, a jealous suitor, and a bunch of reward seekers are determined to stop her.
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What critics compared Grand Theft Auto to
Scratching an itch, this Formula One drama has a lot going for it at the starting line: a real-life 1976 rivalry between magnetic competitors James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl); a burnished, beer-commercial glow courtesy of inspired cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle; and the director of the original Grand Theft Auto, Ron Howard.
Howard’s initial foray into directing was a Roger Corman-produced juvenile car-crash movie called Grand Theft Auto (1977), which he helmed when he was still thought of, to borrow from a Saturday Night Live skit, “lil’ Opie Cunningham.”
It’s an impressively fast-paced film for Howard, the director of numerous biopics and historical pieces based in in other worlds, but the very nature of its pacing and setting harks back to “Grand Theft Auto,” his very first feature as a director.
To witness this level of storytelling skill (applied to a subject only a fraction of the public inherently finds interesting) is to marvel at not only what cinema can do when image, sound and score are so artfully combined to suggest vicarious experience, but also to realize how far Howard has come since his directorial debut, 1977’s bang-up “Grand Theft Auto.”
This was the guy who starred in Eat My Dust and whose first movie as a director was Grand Theft Auto, after all; it's sort of a homecoming for him and a relief to be reminded that expectations attached to his name don't always have to include blandness.
Director Ron Howard ("Frost/Nixon"), whose last film, "The Dilemma," was his worst, has rebounded with one of his best, perhaps not surprising for the man whose first feature was 1977's "Grand Theft Auto" for Roger Corman.
John Wick is ballet for the Grand Theft Auto generation, the genre superseding any preconceived notions of its limitations to metamorphize into something bigger.
Though kudos to director Toby Meakins for choosing to stage a couple of the film’s sequences in the fashion of an old green-screen (think Amstrad CPC era) video game – one that sees Kayla try to save her mother from an invading giant rat, rendered in pixels on a screen like an old-school side scroller; and a second that sees Kayla and Isaac driving to their destination in top-down Grand Theft Auto style!
Moving at an almost breakneck speed, “Bad Boys for Life” plays on screen like a live action version of “Grand Theft Auto.”
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The revenge fantasy that follows plays like a drab and muddy take on Grand Theft Auto.
Between the pic’s day-glo subtitles and absurd death toll and refreshingly bizarre one-liners, this “Grand Theft Auto”-esque romper is fiery in ways its star never has been, making for an action flick that’s a fit for old-timers and newbies alike.
Moon fans will appreciate the reappearance of Chesney Hawkes's 'One And Only' (it gets more than one outing), while Gyllenhaal's leap and tumble onto a platform at speed is pure Grand Theft Auto.
Not quite as boneheaded as its precursors, “Fast Five” is part “Grand Theft Auto,” part “Mission: Impossible” and more ridiculous than ever.
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Besides, all the little sociopaths do nowadays is play antisocial games such as Grand Theft Auto and endlessly rewatch those SAW movies!”
The film wraps a "Grand Theft Auto" world view in weak platitudes about due process.