The Last Chase (1981)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Dumb ideas, cheap plotting and shoddy filmmaking come together in The Last Chase to create a film that would probably be practically unknown today if it wasn’t for Canadian Content guidelines requiring Canadian Cable channels to run a certain percentage of home-made content per week in order to keep their broadcast license. Despite proposing a fast car as a poke in the eye of dystopian red-white-and-blue fascism, The Last Chase is very much a Canadian production, complete with barely-disguised Toronto Subway cars and no less a Canadian media personality like Moses Znaimer in a minor role. Lee Majors counts as a casting coup as the former race-car driver protagonist, moping around two decades later as the evil freedom-crushing government of the day has reacted to a global pandemic by taking away all cars. (Yes, it’s about as stupid as it sounds.)  Officially an advocate for public transit but secretly putting together his racecar for a heroic drive from oppressed Boston to freedom-loving California, Majors does have a certain presence on-screen and makes the film just a bit more tolerable to watch. The Last Chase is certainly not a film to approach as serious science fiction: Every single world-building element seems to come from a strikingly reactionary rant, ignoring basic tenets of reality in order to build its feverish paranoic vision of an oppressive government taking away… gasoline! AND CARS! (The funniest moments of the film, at least if you’re watching critically, are when this supposedly all-powerful, all-oppressive government can’t muster anything land-based beyond a golf cart to follow a fast car. Yeah… I don’t think the screenwriters cared much about how oppressive governments really work.)  The production values are threadbare, adequately reflecting the nothing-makes-sense nature of the script. By the time the state mobilizes a fighter jet to pursue the windshield-less “racecar” all the way to California (there’s apparently nothing between Boston and California but desert), we’re well into MST3K so-bad-it’s-funny territory, except the funny one-liners. I’m not necessarily against CanCon requirements, but when the CRTC gets around to asking me for advice, I hope I’ll have forgotten all about The Last Chase.