ftalker

This science-fiction movie is set seven-years-on from the time it was made and is broadly reminiscent of the 1933 White House Putsch. Although an above-averagely well-acted and well-written Hollywood movie, it still fails to fully explore its global themes of the dangers of nuclear war, along with the inherent fascism of Western countries - fascism necessitated by its need to justify exorbitant military-spending in order to deter nuclear attack. It prefers, instead, to claim that America is in danger of becoming the fascist dictatorship it always was-designed-to-be, springing from among the even-more-totalitarian members of its own military forces.

So long as the essential facts of the undemocratic essence of the United States (US) and of Western culture, in general, are ignored (corporations disguised as countries), the film works just fine as a dramatised battle between the forces of light and those of darkness - albeit one in which the forces of light can only pretend to be somewhat better than those of darkness.

This false dramatic-contest mirrors the pseudo-polarised politics of White countries in their continually-presenting those allowed-to-vote with a Hobson's Choice at the ballot box; all the while ensuring that underlying political-policies are kept intact in order to hypocritically maintain a status quo at home, while funding coups d'état abroad which perpetuate the very authoritarianism being critiqued here; proving that, in the West, it doesn't really matter whom you vote for.

Similarly, the theme of a lack of any genuine political-choice - which this movie evades - gives the audience no-one to really root-for because both sides are just as bad as the other in one side spouting morally-platitudinous pieties about the flawed-by-design sanctity of the US Constitution, while the other claims that nationalism, patriotism & political loyalty permits sedition and treason against any democratically-elected politicians that one happens to disagree with. And this very Constitution was, in fact, used to spread death-and-destruction around the Earth; eg, South Korea in 1948, Iran in 1953 & Vietnam in 1963.

This is an overlong thriller with, unfortunately, no red herrings to distract us from the rather obvious twist-ending.

Robert De Niro excels in a small part in which he practically winks knowingly at the audience that he knows full-well that he is asking Mickey Rourke's private detective to find someone that the latter actually knows personally very well, indeed.

This kind of death-fixated mystery (eg, Mr Arkadin 1955, Point Blank 1967 & The Sixth Sense 1999) with supernatural overtones has been done too often to be fully-engaging. Only the strong sense-of-atmosphere and the high quality of the performances from all involved gets us to the finale in more-or-less one piece. Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet are particularly fine with the good personal chemistry necessary to make their romance convincing.

Fun movie which works as a kind of sequel to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove in that the post-apocalyptic world must re-populate itself after the nuclear holocaust by utilising the sexiest women to ensure that the few remaining fertile-men are aroused enough to engage in ferocious, regular & polygynous procreation. (This movie even lifts dialogue from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and a repeated "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" musical cue from Dr. Strangelove.)

The saving grace of this film is that it does not take itself too seriously so that the audience doesn't have to. Sandahl BERGMAN, Roddy PIPER, Julius LEFLORE, Cec VERREL & Rory CALHOUN work-well together and they understand full-well that they are in a B-movie with lots of absurd humour and action, not a Shakespeare production.