There's an old children's show called 3-2-1 Contact that featured a bunch of crime-solving kids called The Bloodhound Gang. Most of their mysteries were just a means to teach elementary science lessons, but one episode actually featured a car chase in the climax. Keep in mind, this was a children's show on PBS in the early eighties, so the drivers continued to obey the speed limit and use their turn signals. That chase compared favorably to every car chase in The Longest Run.

The movie starts like most movies about getaway drivers: a cold open where we see the driver pull a getaway. It worked in The Driver, Drive, Baby Driver, Driving Miss Daisy—so why not here? First we see Adam (Michael Fredianelli, who also wrote and directed) steal a car for the job. Then he drives to where he's supposed to meet some guy after whatever stickup he's pulling. The production looks cheap, but for the first couple minutes, I thought they might be able to pull off something interesting. Then the stickup kid jumps in the car and utters the movie's first line of dialogue. He contorts his face into an unpleasant shape and says, "They thought they had me, but I slipped away. That's why they call me Jake the Snake, baby!" He punctuates the last sentence with a hiss and a little snake dance. Not a good sign. My thumb is already hovering over my remote's back button.

A cop spots them and the first car chase begins. Adam swerves through a pile of trash bags for no apparent reason. Eventually he forces the cop car to slam into the back of a truck. Slipshod editing attempts to hide the fact that there was no actual impact.

Next we meet Deke. The Longest Run separates itself from those other driver movies by being about not one, but two whole drivers, and giving us the same cold open for both of them. In the course of Deke's getaway, he shakes a cop car by forcing it to slam into the back of a truck. It's not any more impressive the second time.

Deke and Adam get their jobs from the same mobster. He needs someone to rescue his niece Gina from her abusive boyfriend and take her to Wyoming. Despite promising the next available job to Adam, he discreetly passes it to Deke instead. Unlike the movie's numerous other narrative deviations, this one actually has a logical reason behind it: the abusive boyfriend is Adam's brother.

Picking up Gina turns into a whole thing, and Deke winds up shooting the boyfriend. Adam gets there just in time to catch his brother on the verge of death. He lives long enough to identify Deke as his killer. It's not that they knew each other. Deke conveniently provided his real name when he came to extract a mobster's niece from a domestic violence situation.

Adam hits the road hoping to intercept Deke and Gina before they get to Wyoming. He manages to catch up to them at a hotel. Up to now, I had assumed that his plan was to kill Deke. Instead he wants to take Gina to Wyoming himself. This is one of those deviations that doesn't have an explanation. I can't think of any possible universe where you avenge your brother's death by doing his killer's job for him. Anyway, Deke knocks Adam out, and the chase unfortunately continues.

The rest of the movie is Adam repeatedly catching up to Deke and Gina at the most opportune moments imaginable. They keep escaping, and Adam keeps finding them again, despite them repeatedly getting an hours-long head start and having hundreds of miles of highway to disappear on.

There's a scene where Adam says he's not doing this for money, but for the principle. Maybe Adam the character is telling the truth, but Fredianelli was lying when he wrote the script.

GINA: "If money's not the issue, then what do you want?"

ADAM: "You'll never understand."

Of course she won't, Adam. Nothing you've done in this entire movie makes any sense at all. The real reason he doesn't explain his motive is the same reason Fredianelli doesn't explain how Adam keeps catching up to Deke and Gina. He doesn't fucking know.

Deke and Gina sure do piss a lot. I counted at least three roadside piss breaks. Apparently Adam has a bladder the size of a basketball. The only time we see him pull over to relieve himself is when he pukes after the concussion he got in the hotel room.

During a stop at a dive bar, a guy makes a gross pass at Gina, then calls her a bitch when she's not susceptible. Deke hands her a gun and tells her to shoot the guy. So she does. Her reaction afterwards is pure elation. It's the kind of reaction you'd expect from Molly Ringwald after dumping a glass of milk on that snooty prom queen's head.

Deke and Gina stop at a greasy spoon, where Gina finally gets the opportunity to piss indoors. Adam arrives while she's away from the table. Is this guy's timing impeccable or what? His conversation with Deke is vaguely reminiscent of the coffee scene with Pacino and De Niro in Heat, but completely stripped of tension and coherence.

In the so-called climax, Adam manages to ambush Deke in one last moment of impossible coincidence. This time he doesn't hesitate to start shooting as soon as he sees Deke approach. A car chase segues into a gunfight in an open field. They finally decide to settle their differences with a foot race. Seriously.

I don't think it's a spoiler to disclose that one or both of them die before the credits roll. Does anyone really give a shit?

Deke and Adam are so nondescript, I had to triple-check this article to make sure I wasn't using their names interchangeably. The two of them combined have less development than Ryan O'Neal's character in the The Driver, and that guy didn't even have a name.

There's one good thing I can say about The Longest Run: it inspired me to look for 3-2-1 Contact on YouTube. Watching a gang of inquisitive kids solve a cryptogram cleansed the palate nicely.

2 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.