Classic Review: Bullitt (1968)

Can a movie be great and at the same time, not that great? Well, Bullitt is here to prove that yes, it could happen.

Bullitt follows Frank Bullitt (McQueen), a police officer tasked with protecting a Mafia informant. While in the line of duty, his friend is shot, and the informant is left with his life hanging by a thread. The attack seems very calculated as Bullitt realizes the killers knew exactly where and when to go. meaning they have a snitch within the police department. Bullitt starts digging around looking for answers and gets tangled in more and more conspiracies.

Bullitt is a thriller that had the luck to be lifted up by McQueen’s charisma. He wasn’t the most versatile of actors, but one cannot say he isn’t great here. His persona works perfectly for his character: the silent, brood type who persistently chases the truth. It’s great when an actor is paired with a character that at the same time takes advantage of the actor’s strengths (even if it’s not the acting chops) while the actor potentialized it. That’s exactly what happens here as Bullitt enhances McQueen’s qualities, and vice-versa. Bullitt may be McQueen’s defining character, with Thomas Crown and Hilts from The Great Escape also fighting for the title.

The great/not great dilemma of Bullitt comes mostly from the script. The story is straightforward but not that engaging, and not everything makes total sense. It feels like the writers wanted to create as much twists and turns as they could, but not crafted the script with that much attention. The plot is somewhat confusing, and no character really pops out besides Bullitt. In a film like this, having strong supporting characters would only improve the fun. However, this was not the case here.

It’s easy to imagine Bullitt being a groundbreaking, gritty film at the time. When viewed under this lense, it’s quite a nice film, and the technical parts all work well. The biggest problem is that the film set the pace for everything that came after, so in a way it ended up diluted and referenced to death. When you get a film that set the standards for everything that came after in the genre, it’s hard remaining fresh after the years, since everything that was inspired by it tried one way or another to improve and perfect what was experience in the first one.

When you watch Bullitt, it’s hard not to think of the cop shows from the 90’s, and at least a dozen other films. But that doesn’t take away from the entertainment that the film still provides. It has aged, yes, but it still has riveting scenes, the most famous one being the groundbreaking car chase sequence through San Francisco, which is still tense and incredibly made. We got so accustomed to CGI that it’s shocking to look at something like this and imagine how this unbelievably complicated sequence was set up to be shot.

In the end, Bullitt is an entertaining film with a somewhat plodding story. But it’s still interesting, mostly for Steve McQueen’s engaging presence on the screen.

still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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