La mort d'un homme

A scruffy, semi shell-shocked journalist is sent to the Namibia/Angola frontier to locate a rogue photographer and, instead, finds a Nazi war criminal trying to cure cancer using snake venom. Neither story is developed and no effort is made to tie them together, but who cares? The guilty pleasures of such far-fetched plotting make it a difficult film to criticize, and uneven casting pushes the whole thing refreshingly close to comedy. John Savage displays all his trademark facial tics and method acting spasms; token love interest Mia Sara looks as if she stepped out of a Vogue Magazine fashion spread straight into the Kalahari Desert; and any movie featuring Ernest Borgnine as an unreformed SS officer is worth at least the cost of a bargain matinée. A neat little double-whammy resolution shows what, with some ambition, this otherwise low rent thriller might have aspired to, but the downbeat, ambiguous ending will instead doom it (not altogether fairly) to quick oblivion on the home video market.