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#26 - Any Which Way You Can
Buddy Van Horn, 1980
Following on from Every Which Way But Loose, Philo wants to give up street-fighting but he is soon roped into a Mafia-organised fight against a particularly dangerous fighter.
The sad thing about watching sequels like Any Which Way You Can is that you can see ideas at work that would have improved the original film but are instead left to flounder in a sequel of generally lesser quality. There are some good concepts at work here - the fact that the Mob constantly try to coerce Eastwood into fighting their champion despite said champion being an extremely affable guy who ends up befriending Eastwood - but they're buried under way too many attempts to lifelessly recycle gags from Every Which Way But Loose. The annoying biker gang I mentioned earlier is back with even more of a vengeance, there's more gags about getting Clyde laid (complete with jokes about tranquilising a female ape that sound an awful lot like date-rape jokes), plus they bring back Sondra Locke's character despite the reasons I mentioned in my last review. Having the film climax in a massive fist-fight across an entire small town was decent enough but it feels like too little, too late, especially in a film that's even longer than its already-overlong predecessor.
Buddy Van Horn, 1980
Following on from Every Which Way But Loose, Philo wants to give up street-fighting but he is soon roped into a Mafia-organised fight against a particularly dangerous fighter.
The sad thing about watching sequels like Any Which Way You Can is that you can see ideas at work that would have improved the original film but are instead left to flounder in a sequel of generally lesser quality. There are some good concepts at work here - the fact that the Mob constantly try to coerce Eastwood into fighting their champion despite said champion being an extremely affable guy who ends up befriending Eastwood - but they're buried under way too many attempts to lifelessly recycle gags from Every Which Way But Loose. The annoying biker gang I mentioned earlier is back with even more of a vengeance, there's more gags about getting Clyde laid (complete with jokes about tranquilising a female ape that sound an awful lot like date-rape jokes), plus they bring back Sondra Locke's character despite the reasons I mentioned in my last review. Having the film climax in a massive fist-fight across an entire small town was decent enough but it feels like too little, too late, especially in a film that's even longer than its already-overlong predecessor.