mtenga

Ray Winstone seems to have made a career for himself playing psycho hard nuts, but there was surprisingly more humanity to his role as Gal in this film, even a tenderness. It was the classical actor Ben Kingsley who had the real nutter role. Both were played admirably even if Kingsley still looked a bit like a librarian despite his short hair cut, tattoos and mockney accent.

Anybody who has seen the excellent 70's movie Villain with Richard Burton will recognise that Ian McShane who had a pretty boy role in that film to Burton's Kray style gangster, gets to ham it up this time as the bad gangster himself. He was quite menacing and the scene with Winstone and James Fox towards the end contained a shocking surprise.

The plot was fairly standard fodder, the retired and Spanish ex-pat gangster Winstone pressed into one last job by his former colleagues. The twist being that the former colleague Kingsley, actually has an ulterior motive.

Add in the always excellent but sadly underused Amanda Redman and a slightly comic turn from Cavan Kendall and you have a stellar British cast.

I got the impression that I was watching a play rather than a film at times and the language will not impress your maiden aunt, but overall it was enjoyable. A few surreal dream sequences mark this film as something more than just the standard swearing, violence and big heist flick.

All in all very enjoyable and worth watching but not a classic.

Firstly I'll say that I enjoyed the film and it kept my interest to the very end but ultimately it was clichéd and unoriginal in most respects.

The characters and settings will be fairly familiar to anybody who has ever watched an apocalyptic movie such as Mad Max, The Postman etc... Like the brooding hero partly responsible for setting the whole thing off, his wise cracking second in command, the driven lost soul but good hearted American etc.. etc..., Nothing new.

The dialogue was slow, not very snappy and I was constantly hoping for things to errr catch fire, but they never did.

A saving feature was the special effects. Seeing the dragon in its full glory at the end will no doubt have terrified many children and the odd adult and it was excellent. But the weak and obvious plot and dialogue did not save the movie, or make it worth a second view.

This is a film all should see. The depiction of the native Americans and the hardships that they face was true to life. They were portrayed as real people with good sides and faults rather than the stereo typical clichés.

The "conquering" of the Indians and the appropriation of their land by the white people was not conveniently ignored or falsely sanitised like you might see in a 1950's movie.

There was good acting all around and Val Kilmer shows that he is more than just a macho pretty type by bringing some depth and honesty to the role. I was touched when he admitted to having been ashamed of his heritage when he was a child. That will ring true for many of us brought up in minorities surrounded by a white majority.

Grahame Greene was the outstanding show but the normally likable Fred Ward's role was under developed in my opinion. Sam Shepard was good as well.

Mysticism, politics and cultural interaction all come to play in an eventually uplifting movie. The end "trade" scene and awakening of the Kilmer character left me feeling good.