[2]
It didn’t fall down fast enough.
The master of disaster, Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure), produced this three-hour TV movie about a handful of people trapped on a bridge collapsing at both ends. Making matters worse, one of them is a fleeing bank robber (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) who won’t let rescuers come near the victims for fear he’ll be captured. The hostages on the bridge include The Naked Gun‘s Leslie Nielsen as the father of a sick baby (whose crying becomes insufferable), Barbara Rush as his love interest, The Brady Bunch‘s Eve Plumb as a frigging nun, and Richard Gilliland (Designing Women) as a wounded police officer. James MacArthur (Swiss Family Robinson, Hang ‘Em High) gets top billing as the man who leads the rescue effort.
The Night the Bridge Fell Down suffers tremendously from having too little story spread over too many hours of run time. It’s less annoying when padded out with flashbacks shedding light on characters’ backstories, but you’ll be tempted to hit the fast-forward button watching characters climb up and down steel girders for minutes on end. There’s little sense of genuine peril, and the film hyper-focuses on the most annoying character of the bunch — Desi Arnaz Jr’s. You’ll wish that bastard would have fallen off the bridge early on, or that someone would grow a pair and push him off. Nielsen is hamstrung in a weak role that ultimately paints him as a villain when he should have been a hero. Gilliland has the most engaging character, but he’s wounded and unconscious most of the time.
With little spectacle and no characters worth investing in, The Night the Bridge Fell Down is nearly unwatchable.
With Gregory Sierra, Char Fontane, Philip Baker Hall, and Ted Gehring. Directed by Georg Fenady.