This Brutal Grindhouse Film Is Among Quentin Tarantino’s Faves and It’s Now Free-To-Stream
John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder is a phenomenal film. In fact, Quentin Tarantino counts the picture among his top ten features of all time. Although I have seen the flick dismissed as a Death Wish clone, that’s a reductive take that discounts this movie’s nuanced emotional core. Rolling Thunder isn’t a by-the-numbers revenge spree meant to be consumed and discarded. The film’s portrayal of the ugly consequences of war elevates it above the majority of exploitation fare, making Rolling Thunder stand out amongst its contemporaries.
Rolling Thunder follows Charlie Rane (William Devane), a prisoner of war who has just returned home to San Antonio and reunited with his family. In the years he was gone, Charlie’s wife (Lisa Blake Richards) has taken up with a new man and his son (Jordan Gerler) has no memories of his father. As if that weren’t devastating enough, Charlie is victimized in a home invasion robbery and his son and wife are killed. With nothing left to live for, the decorated veteran sets his sights on avenging their deaths at any cost.
Part of what makes Rolling Thunder so noteworthy is that the film presents an honest and unflinching portrait of the horrors of war and the lasting impact Charlie’s time as a POW has had on his psyche. The film was released long before the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder were as widely studied as they are today but the portrayal of the condition here is handled respectfully and with sensitivity. This isn’t a film that merely provides a flimsy excuse for its lead character to exact revenge. We get to exist with Charlie as he processes through his trauma. And we watch as everything he holds dear in the world is systematically stripped away.
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Charlie’s plight in Rolling Thunder is agonizing long before the gruesome home invasion. He doesn’t speak much throughout the course of the film. But Devane is such a talented actor that we can fill in the blanks by studying his body language, mannerisms, tone, and inflection. When his wife admits to having taken up with another man in his absence, Charlie looks as if he’s staring right through her. He gives the impression he’s all out of emotional bandwidth. Charlie is numb from what he’s endured. Though he says he knew she would move on in his absence, Charlie conveys a level of hurt that is visible through his stoicism. We can glean all we need to know from the look in his eyes.
We get further insight into Charlie’s state of mind when he takes to sleeping in a tool shed similar in size to his prison cell. On a couple of occasions, Rolling Thunder jumps between the present and the time he spent as a prisoner of war. In one of those sequences, Charlie sits on a single bed with his knees to his chest. Save for the fact that the flashbacks are presented in black-and-white, the two timelines are nearly identical. That conveys a powerful message: Although Charlie is home, he is still very much a prisoner. He’s no longer a POW but he is a prisoner to his trauma.
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A telling exchange transpires When Charlie is roped into an awkward conversation with Cliff, his soon-to-be ex-wife’s fiancé. Charlie smirks at the prospect of making Cliff (Lawrason Driscoll) uncomfortable by discussing the horrors he endured while he was a prisoner of war. You see a twinkle in his eye, as if Charlie is getting a level of satisfaction from making Cliff squirm. As if Charlie is saying, “While I was being held in a prison camp, you were playing house with my wife and son. How does that feel?”
The fact that Charlie doesn’t eviscerate Cliff for moving in on his spouse while he was being tortured overseas speaks to his character and establishes that Charlie is not a man prone to solving problems with violence. It isn’t until everything that matters to him in the world is stripped away that he even considers resorting to force. That makes his eventual violent streak all the more powerful. Charlie is a patient and understanding fellow who has taken the path of least resistance time and again. Bearing witness to all of that before his eventual retaliation streak serves to underscore how broken he is and how far he’s been pushed by what he endured as a POW and how that has been compounded since his return home.
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Aside from a standout performance from the lead character, Rolling Thunder also serves up an epic revenge spree likely to have the audience cheering by the end. Charlie delivers some old-fashioned justice in a variety of inventive ways, including, but certainly not limited to, weaponizing the prosthetic hook he was fitted with following the home invasion. The scene where he sinks his hook into another character’s hand is as grisly as it is imaginative.
Although watching Charlie exact revenge is likely to be satisfying for the audience, it’s easy to recognize that none of his problems have been solved by violence. He gets his pound of flesh but he doesn’t have a happy ending where he rides off into the sunset or gears up for a sequel. That helps to enhance the film’s messaging about the aftermath of war and drives home the point that nothing but time and therapy can be expected to lessen the intensity of his psychological wounds.
All in all, Rolling Thunder is a nuanced portrait of post-war trauma with a dynamite performance by William Devane. If you are interested in checking the film out, you can find it streaming on Tubi as of the publication of this post.
Categorized:Editorials
