The Warriors: Ultimate Director's Cut

Anti-definitive device! The cheap, literal comic book crawl added to Walter Hill's Ultimate Director's Cut of The Warriors completely fails to impress. Doubly so since this is the version that has made the leap to high-definition home video formats. The new preface is poorly and simplistically rendered; bright and bordering on luminous. It jibes badly with the neon simplicity of the Coney Island Wonder Wheel that used to open the film. The dull, muscled figures stitched in up front also have nothing in common with the malnourished, sinewy heroes marching home either. That's not all that has been added though. The film is now littered with freeze frames and artificially implemented panel shifts. The audience forced to literally read The Warriors as a comic book. These artless overlays rob the film of it's dystopian leanings and relentlessly puncture the film's sense of danger. When the Baseball Furies arrive this new edit blunders the moment, Hill preferring to make literal his own subtextual organisation of these competing archetypes, rather than just hold on the peril being generated by massing, warpainted lunatics. The Warriors used to be a soft rock take on A Clockwork Orange, now it's a shameless opportunist, jostling for pocket money with a misunderstood grab-bag of multimedia tricks. For shame.