Against All Odds (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Taylor HackfordRelease Date(s)
1984 (February 25, 2026)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Imprint Films/Via Vision Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region-Free Australian Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD import.]
Something like but not exactly a remake of the film noir classic Out of the Past (1947), itself adapted from Daniel Mainwaring’s novel Build My Gallows High, director Taylor Hackford’s Against All Odds (1984) is an intelligent, ambitious, and slightly draggy neo-noir that partly succeeds at being a little different. Watching it for the first time since its theatrical release 42 (!) years ago, the picture has aged hardly at all—except, that is, for its then-innovative, influential musical score which, partly because of the many imitators that followed, has badly dated it.
Jeff Bridges stars (though second-billed) as pro football player Terry Brogan, released from his team, the Los Angeles Outlaws, following a shoulder injury. Eager to restart his career but broke and left with few options, he accepts an offer from old acquaintance Jake Wise (James Woods), an unsavory bookie, blackmailer, and nightclub owner, to locate his missing girlfriend, Jessie Wyler (top-billed Rachel Ward), coincidentally—or perhaps not so coincidentally—the daughter of the Outlaws’ uber-rich owner (Jane Greer, who played Ward’s part in Out of the Past).
Terry locates Jessie living on a remote island off Cozumel, Mexico. Though initially she resents Terry’s presence, rightly assuming Jake sent Terry to find her, the two become blissfully happy (and very sexually active) lovers. However, at the ruins of Chichen Itza, Terry’s former Outlaws trainer, Sully (Alex Karras), suddenly turns up, now on Jake’s payroll, determined to bring Jessie back. And struggle ensues, and...
Against All Odds retains the noir-spinning love triangle and basic plot of Out of the Past but otherwise doesn’t resemble it much. This version is set in sunny Mexico and, primarily, the beaches and hilltops of Los Angeles. Jessie’s mother is anxious to develop properties on one such hilltop, an ecologically protected section overlooking the 405 Freeway, close to where the Getty Museum is now. The characters played by Bridges and Woods, originally Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, respectively, don’t much act or talk like those original characters. Missing are the original’s great lines, like Mitchum’s iconic “Baby, I don’t care.” If anything, the sexual tension and passionate love implicit in Out of the Past is explicitly expressed in the remake, both helping and hurting this adaptation.
Jeff Bridges, always 100% committed to the characters he plays, sells that aspect of the film. Like myriad noir predecessors, he’s a chump falling for a no-good dame, but in Bridges’s hands one can believe how Terry might fall under Jessie’s spell. It also helps that Rachel Ward is an unusual, exotic and hypnotic beauty, if quickly apparent to the viewer that she’s equal parts Bad News. (The movie, less successful here, tries to have it both ways with the character.) Woods’s would-be mobster comes closest to the original character; he’s also excellent, and the screenplay makes him a wily, master manipulator.
Watching the film again after so many decades, though, what most impressed me was the Jane Greer character. Richard Widmark, another film noir veteran, plays her shady business partner, Ben Caxton, and while he’s okay, in her few scenes Greer becomes the film’s most malevolent character in the film. In Out of the Past, her “malevolence footprint” was relatively small, just a couple of no-good, obsessive, lovesick guys, but in Against All Odds she plays the kind of super-rich person to whom rules don’t apply—if she wants to develop a giant swath of protected land, environmental laws be damned; she just has Caxton do whatever is necessary, up to and including murder, to get anything she wants. What makes Greer so effectively disturbing is her moral detachment. She knows whatever laws those following her instructions break will never come back to bite her—she’s obscenely rich and politically powerful and therefore untouchable. In this sense Against All Odds has more in common with Polanski’s Chinatown than Out of the Past.
In that sense, Against All Odds is partly, and successfully, about how people with some degree of wealth or fame or, in Jake’s case, wealth and notoriety, are more vulnerable than they realize; they are always at the complete mercy of those at higher levels calling the shots. On one hand, I don’t think the football angle for Bridges’s character really works insofar as a celebrity player who blew his considerable fortune is neither very sympathetic nor identifiable, but the parallels of even professional athletes being manipulated by outside forces beyond their control, no matter their skill, jibes with the film’s themes.
At the time of its release, the film garnered a lot of attention for its musical score, by Michel Colombier (Colossus: The Forbin Project) and Larry Carlton, the latter one of the all-time great studio guitarists, and by the Phil Collins hit Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now). Eschewing an orchestral score in favor of one dominated by guitar solos and a few (mostly) background songs featuring the likes of Stevie Nicks, Peter Gabriel, and others was unusual in 1984, especially for this kind of film. It wasn’t the first of its kind, but it seemed to be enormously influential, partly because hiring a handful of studio musicians was a lot cheaper than a full orchestra, and that sound became SOP for scads of lower-budgeted films, particularly the type of Charles Bronson-Cannon Films-era type thrillers. What was innovative quickly became a cliché.
The Region-Free Blu-ray, from Australia’s Imprint label, is an excellent rendering of the 1.85:1 widescreen and color film. It’s basically flawless, with excellent detail, color and contrast throughout. Likewise, the DTS-HD 5.1 Surround and LPCM 2.0 stereo make good use of the surround channels and create a lot of environmental ambiance with the tropical scenes in Mexico.
Repurposed extra features consist of two audio commentary tracks, one with director Taylor Hackford and writer Eric Hughes, the other with Hackford and actors Jeff Bridges and James Woods, though I think a little judicious editing might have combined them into a stronger, single track. Also included are deleted scenes with optional commentary by Hackford, and a trailer.
Not bad, Against All Odds is adult and intelligent, though it falls well short of greatness for reasons I can’t entirely explain. Maybe it’s a little too leisurely told at 121 minutes, maybe it deviates too far from its source material. But it’s undeniably a valiant effort by all and deserves to be remembered and seen.
- Stuart Galbraith IV