Saturday, February 03, 2024

The Gauntlet by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack

 

(pb; 1977: movie tie-in novel, based on Butler and Shryack’s screenplay)

 

From the back cover

“He was a cop who ‘got a job done.’

“She was a hooker set up by both the law and the mob to have a job done on her.

“They were two people with nothing left to do but run.”

 

Review

Gauntlet is a fun, comic book-ish movie tie-in that tries to ground its absurd action-fantasy cinematic counterpart in some semblance of reality and largely succeeds. Penned by Butler and Shryack, who also wrote the screenplay, they add small details and background to their lead characters (including a nice meta-crack about “Dirty Harry”), giving some heft to Gauntlet’s leads. Many of its situations, especially in its last quarter, are still ridiculous but they’re less egregious in their execution than in the film, which come as just silly. This book version is worthwhile if you don’t expect too much and are just looking for something violent but relatively light to fill an hour or two. Below is the iconic Boris Vallejo movie poster.





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