gabivadnai

This picture promises much, delivers very little, strong on style, very low on consistency, work of somebody who cannot tell the difference between form and essence. A depressing waste of time and of the talents of lots of wonderful actors, who perform well. Lots of darkness, plenty of noir atmosphere, collateral characters remain undeveloped, incidents in the story sometimes pinched from other films down the line of cinematic history and cinematography mainly an imitation of Hitchcock, which in itself would be no bad thing. (Witness the the mandatory following, slowly, by the camera of the hero from behind and the slow takes on this. Standard Hitch fare but serving what?)And it does not support the main story of the film. Water being the weak point of our superhero, we expect him to perish during the final swimming pool incident, but it doesn't happen of course, since the main character cannot be lost just like that. (If the director really wanted to do a Hitchcock on this, he, Bruce Willis could have been killed a la Psycho, which wouldn't have been all that inappropriate, but no, happy ending reckons and we lose one side of our friendly as a result of all-pervasive madness. To top it all, the final credits include documentary style reports on the further fate of our main characters, this pulls us back to quasi-reality, leaving the comic books world behind and us without a trace of suspending disbelief. Comics? Horror? Thriller? I suspect, the director himself has no idea where he was heading, and it shows. My advice to him: try his hand on some Bollywood romance and not to waste our time in the future...

This is one of the best adolescent fantasies on celluloid that I know of. It conveys perfectly the the feel of childhood dreams and adventures and the wonder of flying as well as the atmosphere of Florida.

So far from being a Walt Disney type children's movie, as a man in his early sixties I find myself watching it over and over again, whether on TV or video and enjoy it every time! An antidote to depression.

I should only like to add to the already comprehensive, very well observed and intelligent review of this film on the previous pages, namely, that the film score by the great Ralph Vaughan Williams should not be left out of any discussion of the picture. As the film starts with the magnificent mountain scenery and Eric Portman's fantastic introductory speech ("shook hands on it and kept it ever since...", "the 49th parallel, the only undefended border in the world...") you seem to be immediately transported into the spirit and persuasion of this exercise in trying to convince all Americans, not just Canadians, that they should join the fight, their place is with all the others, Europeans, British, French, all peoples under the Nazi yoke.