MacGyver: Le trésor de l'atlantide

This tv-movie picked up right where the series ended and did a great job of delivering another MacGyver adventure! There's lots of great acting by all the cast, and some pretty cool music too. There's plenty of action and of course classic MacGyverisms! A triumphant return for MacGyver to television!

Sunday movie made for TV film with Anderson reprising MacGyver who must find Atlantis, for some reason, and gets involved with serbs who hide out in Battersby Power Station and Brian Blessard overusing his loud voice in EVERY scene.

The plot is horrible, the film is horrible, the action is non-existant and the whole thing sticks of Indiana Jones without the fun, adventure or indeed Dr Jones himself.

Probably made as a cash-in on the Amiga/PC Indiana Jones Game "Fate of Atlantis", it finds MacGyver finding atlantis and its plantium computer...or something.

Its bad. And so is MacGyver's Mullet.

While searching for artefacts relating to the lost city of Atlantis MacGyver and Professor Atticus uncover a lost amulet that holds the key to the location of the lost ark which contains the flame of Atlantis. Looking for more funding Atticus is laughed out of town and strikes out alone with MacGyver's help. They uncover the ark but the theft of the amulet reveals that they are up against Lord Cyril Cleeve who seeks the treasure for himself to add to his riches and get him into the history books.

I watched the TV show in the mid/late 80's and was a regular viewer on Saturday evening here in the UK. However I cannot remember whether it was any good or not (I was maybe 12 when I watched it). However the name was enough to tempt me back to watch this TVM one lazy Sunday afternoon. If the series was as good as this movie then I can only assume that I had nothing better to do with my Saturday evenings back when I was younger!

The film is every inch a TV movie. There is little of quality and much that is cheap or mediocre. The plot is clearly inspired by the Indiana Jones video game where he searches for Atlantis, however it has better effects than this. The story doesn't always make sense and MacGyver's devices to help them are just ludicrous. The worst one is where they escape from a crater by using steam to fire a funnel (with a rope attached) up over the crater edge. The (plastic) funnel not only manages to stick on the crater edge but also supports their weight! This is the one that sticks in my mind but nothing really makes sense if you think about it.

The script is pretty poor but there are actually large sections of the film with little dialogue so we're spared apart from every other scene where the characters recap the plot for those of us not bright enough to keep up. The cheapness of the film can be seen in the sets. Most of the special sets are very plastic looking. Some of the locations (a volcano & the Balkans) look like a quarry and a disused industrial estate respectively. When the film does get a good location (the stately home) the film stock makes it look cheap.

The action is poor mainly due to MacGyver's stupid devices. However even car chases where MacGyver clings to the windshield lack any sort of tension – in fact that one looks like he been strapped to the front of a car as someone slowly drives it round London! There is one good twist in the middle that took me by surprise but the film never builds on it and actually manages to diffuse whatever tension was injected within 5 minutes of the twist occurring.

The cast are laughably poor. Anderson is still stuck in the 1980's with his mullet hairdo. He never convinces in the lead and has the look of a man who is waiting for someone to take control of the film – he is more suited to a good series than films I think. Blessed is having fun (and I'm glad someone did) but is very out of place. His booming voice and high spirits don't fit in at all and it occasionally feels like he's taking the p*ss. Burgress as the bad guy is woefully toothless and the only face of interest is McCormick who is more well known for his role in Casualty.

Overall this is a poor reflection on how I spent my time as a pre-teen. A real poor quality product that aspires to be an Indiana-Jones-on-a-budget film but never even manages to get to that standard of film. Not awful – but just really poor, you'll forget you saw it 10 minutes after you switch it off.

This is really one of the best MacGyver adventures that have ever been put to screen! (Although it was just the TV screen release). If the original MacGyver series ever continued on this path (between the show and these two movies there was a ton of design ideas done differently) it could have been an amazing new twist of adventure energy.. Kind of like how the first season felt, you know..?

The supporting cast is also absolutely legendary in this movie. There is no doubt that they were going for the big vibes here, and I really love the vibrations!

It's also amazing how fresh this feels for a MacGyver adventure - it really feels like a whole new section of his life that I would love to explore more!

TV movies aren't exactly known for subtlety or a delicate hand in their execution; what of a TV movie based on a long-running series that, to at least some degree, was known for cleverness and detail? As it turns out, not even Angus MacGyver can shimmy his way out of the standards of the medium. The pacing is rather swift, and the dialogue and scene writing are sometimes downright lazy or sloppy, whether heavy-handed (such as shoehorning in lines about then-current events in the Balkans, or an excruciatingly ham-handed ending), clichéd, or otherwise. Above all, the writing prioritizes that every scene and every little facet of the plot should align Just So such that MacGyver and his friends can continue on their adventure, but do so with very specific, sometimes arbitrary stakes. Some broad strokes of the narrative are a bit predictable; characters might shift moods two or three times within one scene to match the needs of the forthright storytelling; some particular choices in the dialogue can only inspire skepticism. Even the story at large, clearly asking Richard Dean Anderson to all but don the whip, jacket, and fedora of Indiana Jones, plainly borrows from the blockbuster action-adventure franchise, including the appearance of a certain artifact, a character's motivations, a plot point or two, and the mannerisms that Brian Blessed adopts as Atticus (hello, Henry Jones, Sr.).

None of this is to say that 'MacGyver: Lost treasure of Atlantis' is inherently bad, or that it's not at all fun. It's well made, emphatically including production design, art direction, props, effects, and stunts. Michael Vejar's direction is quite fine, and David Geddes' cinematography; I like Ken Harrison's score. There are, still, flashes of minor brilliance at one point or another as the tale progresses. It's just that the series starring Anderson was nothing if not original and actively engaging, as the protagonist's keen wit was tested under various circumstances; even at its best, this TV movie feels all too imitative as the hockey-loving, mullet-wearing crafter of thingamabobs is thrust into a quasi-fantastical journey, even embracing pseudoscience for the sake of its plot. The "MacGyverisms" we quickly came to love in the series, improvised solutions, are present in some measure. Yet these are generally deemphasized in favor of half-hearted advancement of the story, and small moments that feel all too contrived - pure coincidences to get them out of a situation with something that is at the characters' disposal when there is no reason for it to be. With all this having been said, I think the cast do the very best they can with the material, and sometimes the performances are quite solid; on the other hand, there are definitely times, too, when the actors seem to be straining to be genuine.

I think what it really comes down to is that the screenplay needed to be developed a bit more to weave in more believable dialogue and scene writing. Even if it meant extending the runtime, maybe some scenes could have been added, or others simply built out, to bolster the plot development. And more than anything else: look, I love MacGyver, but this feature comes across as something that was written, greenlit, and ready to go as a standalone TV movie, in no way related to the character we know and love. I might be wrong, but it really seems like the protagonist was written in purely as an effort to cash in on the popularity of the series, or perhaps nostalgia for a series that by that time had run its course a few years prior. True, maybe there's nothing inherently wrong about this, either. The fact remains that save for Anderson's involvement, there's nothing about 'Lost treasure of Atlantis' to meaningfully connect it with 'MacGyver,' which accentuates to me that in the very least this isn't special even in the eyes of those who ordered it, and that it might have been rushed. Now, again, I believe this is well done more than not, and passably entertaining. Even if you're a diehard fan of the series, Anderson, Blessed, or someone else involved, however, I just don't think there's enough here to warrant going out of your way for it. Save 'Lost treasure of Atlantis' for a lazy day, when a "decent" film is good enough for suit your needs, and let's leave it at that.