Word: lifeless
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Some intermittent suspense is provided by the Backstairs makeup artists, whose work varies from serviceable (Buono's Taft) to rudimentary (Vaughn as Wilson) to outright ghoulish (John Anderson and Eileen Heckart as the Franklin Roosevelts). No matter how intriguing the cosmetics, however, the characters mostly remain lifeless: Backstairs at the White House might be more aptly titled Backstairs at Madame Tussaud's. - Frank Rich
...this tends to make the film increasingly silly. Weir gives up on making the characters anything more than symbols, points on the line between evil white and primitive good. A few scenes of the ghetto in which the Aborigines live are lifeless, the city has no character, and the film disintegrates into stock effects. Chamberlain discovers a secret Aborigine city beneath Sydney, and learns that an ancient white civilization was destroyed by a giant tidal wave, and that another one is due very soon. Some sort of eternal justice will destroy the white man's injustice. At the very...
...year sentence, which provokes Billy to deliver an ugly tirade against the Turkish people and nation during his day in court. This marks a new phase, the hardening of Billy Hayes if you will. Billy joins Jimmy Booth in his latest escape plans, Billy goes berserk and mutilates the lifeless body of Rifki (a scene that ranks up there with the most wanton exercises of filmed violence marking Jaws and The French Connection), and he winds up in the ward for the criminally insane. Like some Hieronymus Bosch painting suddenly come to life, the ward makes the rest of Sagmalcilar...
...little more than an excuse for cameo appearances by top European actors (Philippe Noiret, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Jean Rochefort) and restaurants (Paris' Tour d' Argent, London's Café Royal). The settings are sumptuously photographed by John Alcott (Barry Lyndon), but Ted Kotcheff s direction is lifeless. Were it not for the creepy musical score and endless interrogation scenes, it would be difficult to tell that Chefs is a suspense drama...
...even a DePalma. Friedkin and Blatty successfully induce nausea, not terror--unless you're one of the impressionable innocents who gave this film its reputation, in which case, frankly, you have no taste. An excellent performance by Max Von Sydow, a pretty good one by Ellen Burstyn, a lifeless one by Jason Miller (who should stick to--or rather go back to--writing plays), and one by Linda Blair that is as disgusting as anything else in the movie...