Michael Winner must hold the crown for Most Successful Awful Director in film history. With a string of pedestrian Charles Bronson action films to his "credit," and really godawful pictures like FIREPOWER, THE SENTINEL, WON TON TON, THE DOG WHO SAVED HOLLYWOOD, and that astoundingly misbegotten remake of THE BIG SLEEP, I've never understood how Winner kept being allowed to make A-budget pictures. Now I've seen SCORPIO, and I can't understand why he was allowed even to keep making home movies! This is a painfully amateurish film starring several fine actors in what must have been an humiliating experience all around. Every line of dialogue in the movie is looped (dubbed after the fact), destroying any sense of authenticity and verisimilitude. The plot isn't complex enough for one of those comics that comes wrapped around bubble-gum, and technically the film looks like one of those local used-car dealer commercials in a small town. I've been studying Burt Lancaster's career lately, trying to catch up on every film of his I hadn't already seen, yet I couldn't stick this one out quite to the end. If that's being unfair to a picture that turns into a masterpiece in the last few frames, forgive me. There was nothing prior to those frames to indicate even basic competence on the filmmaker's part, much less a potential masterpiece. I've only quit in the middle of three movies in my whole life. This was the third.