What you have here is a revenge movie with pretensions. About 30 minutes needed to be cut out as this drags heavily in places, particularly any scene where Billy Jack is not on camera. He's great, everything else is like amateur hour. Why did we need to see so much of the lame skits? Ugh, for a classic, this was tough to watch.That said, the character was great, he just needed a better movie that wasn't so high on itself.

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd watch a hippie inflected action movie, but here we are. "Billy Jack" basically assembles a small town with young hippie kids, black people and Native Americans, and of course puts them at odds with corrupt cops and evil rich kid types. Luckily for them, the titular Billy Jack is on their side, and he is a martial arts expert and action hero.

It's handy, being a pacifist with a prolifically violent friend. You don't have to get your hands dirty yourself.

I don't know what to say about "Billy Jack". It doesn't work as a movie. Scenes and characters totally fail to build. I guess it does get its message across, if that message is that the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. But it's completely forgettable. And boring.

BILLY JACK is the quintessential '70s film detailing the hippie movement and depicting their struggles against small-town narrow mindedness and bigotry in the American south. Tom Laughlin, who directs as well as stars as the eponymous hero (he's playing the character in the second of five films here, although the last remains unreleased),is in many ways an early version of Rambo in FIRST BLOOD, a highly skilled loner who just wants to be left alone. Unfortunately, as in FIRST BLOOD, the corrupt authorities have other ideas, and that's where the film comes in.

I'm no fan of political polemics in films. I believe they have their place, and that place is not being thrust down your throat in a piece of entertainment. Sadly, a lot of the running time of this overlong film is spent in depicting the hippie movement in a positive light, which in essence means lots of preaching, lots of happy-clappy nonsense and plenty of amateur theatre. BILLY JACK is in reality a didactic film that aims to educate its audience rather than entertain, which is a shame, as all of the subtext stuff is rather dull. Remove all of the 'messages' and you'd have an hour-long film.

Still, the thriller aspects are well-handled even if they're overshadowed by the rest of the film, and it's fun to see a hero using martial arts before Bruce Lee hit the scene in ENTER THE DRAGON. There are the standard elements of many a '70s thriller, including rape scenes, humiliation, ass-kicking, car chases and a siege that doesn't disappointment. Laughlin is excellent in the titular role and his supporting cast, especially the Native Americans, are very good too, but it's just hard to get worked up about a film so intent on spreading the message that it loses focus of what it's all about.