Ambitious attempt by director Brian DePalma to top Steven Spielberg – at least in term of box office gross – with a relentlessly paced thriller. Financed by 20th Century Fox, The Fury was DePalma’s first full scale studio production.

As the film opens, a secret agent – played by John Cassavetes with major league evil – tries to have fellow spook Kirk Douglas killed in the Mideast so that he can get his hands on Douglas’ son, a psychic teen played by the woefully bad Andrew Stevens. Douglas survives and shoots Cassavetes in the arm.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, another teen (Amy Irving) discovers her own psychic abilities, namely, the power to see into the past and manipulate electromagnetic fields to the point of making others bleed. Irving is sent to a special school run by Charles Durning and Carrie Snodgress, where Douglas and Cassavetes become aware of her. Douglas wants to break her out so she can help him find his son, while Cassavetes wants her, apparently to up his count of psychic teens.

With a credited screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel, the movie features some key editing sequences of DePalma bravura. A highlight is Irving’s psychic vision of Stevens and how seamlessly she’s edited into the events of the past as she watches them unfold.

Douglas appears a bit long in the tooth to be playing a teenager’s dad, but the decision to cut back and forth between Spartacus & Cassavetes playing cloak and dagger, and Irving discovering her own powers, was a great idea. The movie builds good momentum in the first hour. Paul Hirsch’s work cutting the film is top notch.

Another major league asset is John Williams’ magnificent score (one of the prolific composer’s most underrated) which gives the film a rousing vibe.

But like so many pulp novels, when it comes time for all this intrigue to add up to something, the air leaks out quicker than a party favor. Cassavetes is the only member of the cast who seems to realize he’s performing sci-fi schlock. Douglas and Irving are miscast and the hapless Andrew Stevens is given nothing to do but get mad. The film cuts back and forth between characters and places and shows us what’s going on quite masterfully, but this material doesn’t really warrant any of this technical mastery.

Why does the government want psychic teens in the first place? To study them, to train them as assassins? Who do Douglas and Cassavetes work for? Where’s the logic in kidnapping a psychic teen after you kill his dad right in front of him?

There’s nothing but plot device here, no characters. The laziness of Farris’ material to go through the motions of another “psychic on the run from the government” story performs irrevocable damage to the movie.