The Swap

This is a strange piece of exploitation filmmaking that came about due to Robert De Niro's popularity in the mid to late 70s. De Niro had previously made a film in 1969 called Sam's Song... back then he was a nobody and the financing on the film ran out and it barely got released. Fast forward to 1979 and De Niro is now a superstar thanks to movies like The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter. The guy who owns the rights to Sam's Song get wise to this and decides to use his footage of De Niro for key scenes in a new film, The Swap, in order to cash in on the actor's recent success. The result is an extremely poor, low-budget revenge-thriller.

Sam (De Niro) is an aspiring young film maker with a dodgy moustache who gets mysteriously killed back in 1969. It's now ten years later and his brother Vito (Anthony Charnotta) gets out of prison and decides to avenge his brother's murder (a conceit that allows for zero interaction between the protagonist and De Niro). The film follows Vito around as he speaks to the people that knew Sam and they piece together the events leading up to his death. Vito begins to uncover a blackmailing scheme gone wrong involving an amateur porn tape implicating some of his brother's so-called friends.

So... all the De Niro stuff takes place in flashback, and it doesn't really have all that much to do with what Vito is investigating as the original film (Sam's Song) actually had nothing to do with blackmailing or anything like that. What you get is two seperate films awkwardly edited together, where none of the characters involved in the main narrative even share the screen with De Niro (in fact, some of the characters that Vito revisits from the original film aren't even played by the same people). It's tacky, cheaply-made, and trades on bad wannabe-gangster stereotypes with stilted, cliched dialogue. You'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching a porn movie without the sex scenes, that's how bad it is. Oh, and nothing remotely interesting happens at any point whatosever - the 'exciting' climax is completely devoid of any dramatic tension.

The De Niro sequences are easily the highlight of the film, especially a slow motion sequence where Sam acts out a beachside shoot-out where he plays both the shooter and the victims. Other than that it's boring, lame and has no real reason to exist other than as a way to use the De Niro footage from Sam's Song.

TRIVIA: This film is also known as The Line of Fire. It probably has two names in order to try and trick people into buying it twice, because whoever made it is obviously a scumbag.

The original film, Sam's Song, is notoriously hard to find. A lot of copies of it are allegedy just re-labelled copies of The Swap, and are not actually the original film. There's been a lot of confusion regarding these two films, so much so that IMDB.com listed them as the same movie up until just recently.