Word: eviler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...complex than a belly laugh or a body blow, the Disney organization has produced a movie that confronts the Dostoyevskian terrors of the heart. In tone, The Fox and the Hound is a return to primal Disney, to the glory days of the early features when the forces of evil and nature conspired to wrench strong new emotions out of toddlers and brooding concern from their parents. The Fox and the Hound lacks the craftsmanship and concise wit that brought a dozen or more characters to idiosyncratic life in the earlier films. The comic relief is perfunctory at best...
...militants, who derided his Chinese-Irish heritage. Homosexual punks and homicidal psychopaths were everywhere. "It is only a matter of time," he notes, "if you love life too much or fear violence too much, before you become a thing, no longer a man ... lending yourself to every conceivable low, evil, degrading act anyone tells you to do." Or, like Abbott, you exert beastliness to preserve the soul. In the penitentiary world, he says, a man can "despair because he cannot bring himself to murder...
Which is fine, a good idea. But instead of trying to understand and evoke what that evil might mean. Carpenter dresses it up in a preposterous and complicated plot, and must spend so much time sorting out the silly details that he has no time for anything more substantial. Even as escapist summer fare, this movie is a disaster--it lacks both an entertaining plot and any sympathetic characters...
...that is a shame, because Carpenter is talented (Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13), and because the idea of New York as penal colony has so much potential. Carpenter, though, simply wastes the possibilities. Manhattan, with its mounumental architecture on every block, has an abundance of magnificent locations for titanic, evil struggles. Why then did Carpenter choose to set Escape mostly in the anonymous alleys and burntout storefronts of other cities? And why does he employ location shots for a meaningless wrestling match (featuring a performer who bears an admirable resemblance to that titan of professional wrestling. George "The Animal" Steele...
...where a simple and effective plot would have worked better. The appeal of his fantastically successful Halloween lay in the unadorned menace of the villain; New York could have served a similar function. It is a city of extremes, both good and bad, and Carpenter, might have seized its evil and wrung from it a portrait of malignancy out of control. But he didn't. He didn't even try. It wouldn't have been that difficult--all he had to do was ride the subways...