(WARNING - CONTAINS MILD SPOILER) The movie ends in manic laughter and a fight about the fee for the last stunt (O'Toole's side of which is yelled from a feverishly whirling helicopter); an image that - summing the whole thing up - evokes the chaos and conflict of real war, transposed into a setting of much more trivial battles and easy myth-making potential. The movie is a rather flatly functional rendering of an intriguing concept, with O'Toole less entertaining than memory suggested as a dictatorial but essentially benevolent colonial tyrant whose excesses must somehow be assimilated by the Vietnam vet for his ultimate healing. The movie plays with the audience, blurring the process of movie-making into an unbroken cavalcade of derring-do; the relationships are just as broad and cartoonish; it doesn't have much texture (partly because of Railsback's rather empty work) until the late stages, where the underlying theme comes to prominence and events incline in a cathartic direction. But even then it lacks definition, being open to charges of exploiting the Vietnam theme for easy gravity.
Review of The Stunt Man
