Director Michael Ritchie tore the innards out of the beauty contest culture with "Smile," competitive sports with "Downhill Racer" and politics with "The Candidate."
Here he does the same service for the Great American Crime Film. Robert Dillon's script is an extended Irish joke, a la John Huston ("The Treasure of Sierra Madre," "Beat the Devil," "The List of Adrian Messenger"). A plausible surface does not mean a realistic film.
Michael Ritchie takes iconic actors like Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman, who only have to be visible to make an effect. He puts in lots of destruction of property, and neo-Nazi blond bad boys falling by the score. There's shotguns and submachine guns and carnivorous farm equipment and 18-wheel trucks and all sorts of unlikely weapons. And the usual movie dichotomy of country good, city bad is stood on its head, with agriculture fairs and cornfields and sunflower fields as dangerous to life and limb as you could hope for (paging Alfred Hitchcock!).
There are complaints in some reviews here that the film is vulgar. It is, and it knows it is, and is not simple-minded about it at all. There are complaints that it is violent. It is, and the violence is deliberately exaggerated to remind you at all times that you are watching a movie. There are complaints that we never learn enough about the characters' previous lives. The film knows it, and systematically gives you just less than enough information. The idea is for you to use your imagination afterwards, rather than have the film hold you by the scruff of the neck and rub your nose in stuff that really doesn't matter except to tie things up with a bow.
What matters is not who the characters are, because they aren't. There are few real people here, and none of them are important to the story. It's in what the characters do, and what gets done back at them, and how does this reflect other movies, and the culture that produces movies like this in the first place? When you watch a hit-man with a heart of gold, a bad guy named Mary Ann who traffics in narcotics and prostitution, and learn more about the stockyards than you probably want to know, it's not because the filmmakers are stupid or incompetent. It's because they're deliberately trying to skew everything you see a little to one side and play around with your expectations.
Some people don't like the sensation of being thrown off balance. But if you think you might like it, by all means give this picture a try. It's funny.
Here he does the same service for the Great American Crime Film. Robert Dillon's script is an extended Irish joke, a la John Huston ("The Treasure of Sierra Madre," "Beat the Devil," "The List of Adrian Messenger"). A plausible surface does not mean a realistic film.
Michael Ritchie takes iconic actors like Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman, who only have to be visible to make an effect. He puts in lots of destruction of property, and neo-Nazi blond bad boys falling by the score. There's shotguns and submachine guns and carnivorous farm equipment and 18-wheel trucks and all sorts of unlikely weapons. And the usual movie dichotomy of country good, city bad is stood on its head, with agriculture fairs and cornfields and sunflower fields as dangerous to life and limb as you could hope for (paging Alfred Hitchcock!).
There are complaints in some reviews here that the film is vulgar. It is, and it knows it is, and is not simple-minded about it at all. There are complaints that it is violent. It is, and the violence is deliberately exaggerated to remind you at all times that you are watching a movie. There are complaints that we never learn enough about the characters' previous lives. The film knows it, and systematically gives you just less than enough information. The idea is for you to use your imagination afterwards, rather than have the film hold you by the scruff of the neck and rub your nose in stuff that really doesn't matter except to tie things up with a bow.
What matters is not who the characters are, because they aren't. There are few real people here, and none of them are important to the story. It's in what the characters do, and what gets done back at them, and how does this reflect other movies, and the culture that produces movies like this in the first place? When you watch a hit-man with a heart of gold, a bad guy named Mary Ann who traffics in narcotics and prostitution, and learn more about the stockyards than you probably want to know, it's not because the filmmakers are stupid or incompetent. It's because they're deliberately trying to skew everything you see a little to one side and play around with your expectations.
Some people don't like the sensation of being thrown off balance. But if you think you might like it, by all means give this picture a try. It's funny.