After Duel, Steven Spielberg's dazzling way with the cars in The Sugarland Express was almost a foregone conclusion: stately processions snaking through the countryside in the wake of the fugitives, multi-coloured roof-lights forming intriguing patterns in the night, pursuers retarded by the telephoto lens looming menacingly out of the heat-haze at the crest of a hill. But where Duel was motivated by a strange inner compulsion, The Sugarland Express seems peculiarly contrived, with a script (albeit based on fact) so self-consciously tailored to the 'road film' formula that from the very outset the illusory Eldorado of Sugarland becomes a dismayingly obvious metaphor for the bitter-sweetness of the odyssey we are invited to watch…. All too early on … the whole thing is revealed to be a storm in a teacup, and one watches with mounting disbelief as both police and public go through their extraordinary gyrations: it may have...