Word: friedkins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Directed by WILLIAM FRIEDKIN Screenplay by WALON GREEN...
...trouble lies more with us than with the picture. Maybe we have been so brainwashed to expect nothing but implausibilities during the dog days that it is hard to respond to a film that takes itself as soberly as this one does. Or maybe we expect something loopier from Friedkin, who prides himself on making slam-bang movies (The Exorcist, The French Connection) that are expertly designed and executed to appeal to us at a low, visceral level. Or-just possibly-Friedkin, despite the noisy response he made to critical hooting over The Exorcist, is answering it with a distinctly...
...Wages of Fear is retained. The setting is still an imaginary Latin American dictatorship, more corrupt and depressed than even Conrad might have dreamed up. Once again there has been a blowout in a remote oil well, for which the only remedy is a lot of dynamite. Friedkin carefully-too carefully-sets all this up. He explains just why the well is not reachable by air and why the only available dynamite has aged into a highly volatile condition. Finally, as before, four desperate characters, men with nothing to lose, are recruited to drive the explosive by truck over...
Most sequels offer more of the same. This one offers less of the same. William Friedkin's original was well enough made to be offensive. Here we are spared many of Friedkin's cheap shocks - the mutilations, the vomiting, the bestiality...
...blockbuster war movies, Mac Arthur and A Bridge Too Far (which cost almost three times as much as Lucas' film), will open with their own galaxies of stars-old-fashioned Hollywood stars. In addition, there will be underwater adventure in The Deep, straight suspense in The Sorcerer (William Friedkin's remake of that wonderful old French movie The Wages of Fear), and devilish terror in Exorcist II: The Heretic...