Clint Eastwood directed and stars in this film which i like a lot.
This film had an unofficial watered down PG-13 remake a few years back called 16 Blocks which had Bruce Willis in the lead and in my opinion was a very pale and weak imitation.
The transfer to Blu Ray is a huge improvement over the old DVD edition of this movie but unfortunately the film has suffered far too much digital noise reduction and probably some scratch and debris removal. The resulting image is far too clean and processed looking for a film from the late seventies and there is also isolated incidents of blocking on walls and backgrounds as well as some minor edge enhancement in a few scenes and a video look to the whole film. Blu Ray is capable of delivering film like images and i dislike studio's tampering with the original image as they have done with this film.
I think it's very possible that the print had a fair amount of damage and Warner did not want to spend money on a new transfer from a pristine film print or the studio felt the grain was too heavy and encoding for a single layer disc would prove time consuming thus they took the decision to remove a fair amount of film grain and this allowed them to encode at a lower bitrate and fit everything on a 25GB disc. Whatever the case may be i think the image has suffered and i do not like what i see onscreen.
I can only recommend this disc for those looking for an upgrade from the old DVD. If you want your movies to look like film then i suggest you rent this first and make your own mind up because if you buy it you might be disappointed.
This disc is the North American release but is not region coded thus will work on any Blu Ray player anywhere in the world.
I consider this a poor release due to DNR and have added it to the major issues list which you can view by clicking here.
Once you open the Blu Ray screenshot you may need to click the frame again for the full HD image to appear. These Blu Ray frames are captured directly off the disc.
