Word: crichtons
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...MOST EXCITING moment in Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery comes during the first 15 minutes of the film: Leslie Anne Down slips off her stockings, sticks her rear end into the camera and slides vertically over Sean Connery into bed. Visually, this evokes a shot in Crichton's last film, Coma, where Genevieve Bujold slipped off her stockings, stuck her rear end into the camera and climbed a ladder. Crichton is a clever man, a Harvard graduate; those pretty rear ends may be his way of saying, "Shit on you, folks...
...Great Train Robbery is one of the most cynical "pure escapist" movies ever made. Crichton hasn't even bothered to conceal his disgust for his lifeless hackwork. He crams his screenplay with adventure-movie cliches, but he doesn't poke fun at them; he piles them on as if to show how much he can get away with. Movies like this aren't very entertaining if they're not stylish or suspenseful; Crichton's stupid, stilted dialogue precludes style; the Mission: Impossible predictability, sluggish editing, and surprising number of loose ends strangle suspense. Characters inexplicably appear and disappear--dragged...
...Crichton departs from the formula in only one respect: whenever possible, he forces gratuitous cruelty between cliches. Dogs chew rats. A prisoner escaping from Newgate slices up his hands climbing the fence. Connery later strangles this poor innocent in cold blood. The funniest gag in the movie involves a decomposing cat. Nothing new for this butcher. In Crichton's Westworld, the most satisfying fantasies are also the bloodiest--robots blown to bits; one remembers brains being sliced up, organs flung about, dead bodies on dissection tables in Coma; now, Crichton gets his kicks injecting sadism into kiddie-movies. Bleah...
...film's source material, Crichton's own bestselling novel, had far more zip. Crichton conceived the book as a socially conscious thriller: he not only told the story of the robbery but also drew a savage, well-researched portrait of the economic inequities and moral hypocrisy of the mid-Victorian era. Unfortunately, he has not found a way to translate his Dickensian themes to film. Though his movie contains vivid re-creations (shot in Ireland) of London's stately mansions and grisly slums, Crichton photographs them as if he were a sightseer. His usual acerbic point...
Connery's cool rogue occasionally conveys a bit of Crichton's original intentions. The character's honest amorality stands in contrast to the false piety of the wealthy bluebloods he swindles. But Connery's low-key performance is often vitiated by Donald Sutherland's uncharacteristically broad caricature of a bum bling aide-de-crime. Then again, when the delicious leading lady is at hand, both men tend to fade away. The great train robbery may well have been the crime of its century, but it looks like petty theft compared with Down's ability...