The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

(Criterion Streaming, January 2020) Some movies just can’t quite reach their potential, even when that potential is modest. Considering that The Ultimate Warrior is a dystopian 1970s thriller featuring Yul Brynner as the titular character and Max von Sydow as the leader of a band in post-apocalyptic Manhattan, you could at least expect something. The Ultimate Warrior came after the high-energy first wave of blaxploitation movies where action started being shot relatively well, even the idea of a modest exploitation thriller promises a lot more than what this film is able to offer. Seemingly shot on a mixture of a dirtied backlot and dusty subway interiors, the film is a chore to watch—uninteresting, trite and meaningless. Writer-director Robert Clouse (who did direct action landmark Enter the Dragon!) can’t get much out of the normally solid Brynner with his threadbare plot and indifferent direction. The Ultimate Warrior was somehow selected by the Criterion Streaming folks as representative of dystopian 1970s Science Fiction, but absolutely not essential.