Word: formulaically
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...FORMULA Directed by John Avildsen Screenplay by Steve Shagan
Once Marlon Brando's disguise has been penetrated and the great eccentric has been identified, such suspense as The Formula manages to generate comes to an abrupt and early end, though whatever fun and frolic the film offers depends solely on his occasional presence as the comically menacing leader of an oil cartel. Perhaps one should say the oil cartel. The movie traffics heavily in this kind of simple-minded paranoia. It insists that evil lurks in a single all-powerful force possessing the power to warp men's minds, condition their behavior and, of course, bump them...
...title formula is for a synthetic fuel invented by Nazi scientists. The conceit is that it has been kept off the market since World War II by the oil interests in order to keep up the price of crude. A sometime Los Angeles cop and his wife are killed when it looks as if they are about to go public with the secret. The search for their killers-and the precious equations they were killed for-leads Detective George C. Scott to Germany and Switzerland and to involvement not only with remnants of the Third Reich but with modern terrorists...
Like so many movies and books that try to graft topical subject matter onto the obsessive mass-market interest in the Nazi past. The Formula requires too much exposition. By the time all the improbable explanations for its linkages between a fast-receding past and today's headlines have been laid out, all the false trails explored, the action lies buried under a pile of verbiage. It used to be that detective stories were lean and laconic. The attempt to give them spurious importance by having them address what are thought to be big subjects is ruining them. They...
...lawyers have met privately with MGM officials to object. Says a Mobil spokesman: "This is not even a good piece of fiction." The clear winner from the film is Marlon Brando, who received a reported $250,000 a day for ten days' work. That is a real formula for making money...