The Warriors
(Paramount)

Considering gangs today, Walter Hill’s 1979 depiction of street thugs running amok is about as menacing as the Vienna Boys’ Choir, albeit boys who know how to fight. The prime ingredient in this film is cheese, but the guilty pleasure kind – sort of like Velveeta. The Warriors are a gang from Coney Island, invited to a big pow-wow in the Bronx, that to them, is as foreign and distant as Baghdad, despite being only a few miles away. All the major NYC gangs assemble to listen to a speech by Cyrus (leader of the Riffs, the largest group in the city), who is attempting to bring the thousands of miscreants together to create a huge criminal underground to take control of New York. When Cyrus is assassinated by a member of the Rogues, the Warriors are framed for the murder and have to battle their way home between stops on the subway. Any gang worth their colors would be able to hotwire a car and hop on the BQE to escape, but that would be too simple, right? Instead, these dudes take on the Baseball Furies, the Lizzies and several other collections of bad-asses who are looking to collect the reward money that’s up for grabs.

Hill based his story on the legend of a band of Greek soldiers caught behind the lines in Persia and who also had to bravely fight their way home, but unfortunately, our modern-day protagonists don’t warrant the same sort of mythic reverence. For this “Ultimate Director’s Cut,” Hill has added comic book illustrations to serve as transitions between several segments, that actually detract from whatever power the movie tries to muster. It might have been a better idea to include the earlier version and let the audience decide which one they liked best. Now that The Warriors has been turned into a video game (and by all accounts, a pretty good one), the film might be of interest to a new generation too young to have seen it the first time around. ---David Bassin