The Wages of Fear

Do you remember that Demi Moore film version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER where they added sex, violence, and a happy ending? If you do remember that, this movie is pretty much the same thing. It's a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic 1954 film about four desperate men transporting highly volatile nitroglycerine over rocky terrain to extinguish a South American oil drill fire. That film was intelligent, well-crafted, and featured some of the most suspenseful scenes in film history. This remake takes that masterpiece, dispenses with any subtext, and pours on muscular action in the vein of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS franchise. As dumb as that sounds, it's entertaining enough. Also, I'll admit to having a soft spot for the ridiculous Demi Moore Hawthorn films (it may have my favorite John Barry score), but if you want an actually good remake of the Clouzot film, check out William Friedkin's 1977 version, THE SORCERER, which manages to equal Clouzot's original in both intelligence and nail-biting suspense.

This is the second adaptation of the french movie and this time netflix gives it a spin. It's not a film that was needed to be made in any capacity but for what it's worth it was atleast enjoyable for the most part. So there's this oil refinery. It's pressure is mounting to dangerous levels and if it ends up exploding it would cause problems for a lot of people. A team are sent it to for some reason grab nitroglycerin from a compound so it can be driving into the raging fire of the refinery and blown in order to save everyone. Now this makes no sense atleast to me and it's very vague but atleast the cast seemed to be decent enough.

New from Netflix, a film that is shot well, the graphics are good, but overall it is bad and here's why. From the very beginning, Murphy's law occurs around the main characters, everything bad that can happen to them will definitely happen, if at first it may seem interesting, but by the fifth case it can get boring.

The plot of the film lasts so long that we see the title of the film when we have already watched a third of the film. And the content of this plot is so empty that it does not affect the further course of events, we did not get to know the characters closely, and the plot did not advance at all.

The main plot revolves around two brothers who must heroically save the settlement from the explosion of a gas well. On the way to this goal they face all sorts of obstacles, from shootouts and chases to banal roadblocks.

The main characters are stupid and naive, just look at the scene where the explosives technician is hiding from the explosion behind a car stuffed with explosives. But the ending of the film can surpass even this...

In general, it's a pity to waste time - a waste product that has been digested many times.

At the end of my review for the original "The Wages of Fear" I suggested that a remake could be made as there were material enough to improve some of its small problems, and also as the American remake "Sorcerer" was also lacking on something as both differed a little from the novel by Georges Arnaud. I wasn't wrong in asking for a new version. But what I couldn't predict was this new take by Netflix would turn into such a weird and lackluster experience.

The risky adventures of a group of men while dealing with countless obstacles in order to perform a dangerous mission was turned into a punch-throwing/gun shooting action film instead of the two previous thrilling character studies on courage and cowardice. For the many updates made to bring this story to the 21st century and little homages to the classic 1953 film, it's no use of seeing it as what's been done before is a hundred times better, more effective and enjoyable than this near disaster of a movie.

But I gotta be honest: it offers some decent entertainment and it has potential to attract curious hearts who might like the many thrills faced by the characters. This time, we have two brothers (Franck Gastambide and Alban Lenoir) in the crew, rather than all complete strangers joining forces in order to save a village from the disastrous perils offered by an oil rig explosion. The duo goes against each other after a mistake from the past made one of them went to jail for a crime he didn't commit. Throw in the bunch the lover (Ana Girardot) of one of them, a ruthless commander (Sofiane Zermani) and his team, all driving through the desert carrying a huge cargo of dynamite, crossing an African nation in turmoil in the middle of a major political turnover. The way to their mission isn't just dangerous because of the terrible roads, but also the presence of armed rebels who kills whoever comes to their territory.

A handful of good moments doesn't satisfy as a whole, and Julien Leclercq's sense of direction isn't strong enough to make it a compelling work.

This "Wages of Fear" turned into a confusing action-driven flick with one dimensional characters, and the whole cruel greedy from them felt forced, simply used to form a "plot twist". Add to the mix the insane ammount of plot holes put on this, that it's not even funny. You may want to watch the film just to witness everything that goes wrong.

It wasn't a total waste of time (loved the land mine sequence but I've seen it done before), and I really think it could go worse - almost left after the first minutes as it felt like a sequel of some movie I haven't seen before due to the terrible presentation of the lead characters. It'll find some audience, but my advice remains the same: watch Clouzot's film and/or Friedkin's remake as they are near perfect in matters of cinema and positively better on all accounts if compared to this unwanted new take. 5/10.

When I first started watching the movie with the English dubbed version, I didn't enjoy it because the voices and sound effects seemed slow and unimpressive. I then tried watching it with the original soundtrack, but it didn't get any better. The action scenes, which should have been thrilling, were just not exciting at all, mostly because they were too focused on showing violence without a good pace. The sound editing was also not great, making the movie feel dull and uninteresting. It seemed like the filmmakers were more interested in filming some nice scenes in the rocky terrain than in developing a gripping story. I couldn't feel any empathy for the main characters when they were in danger or got hurt because the movie didn't make me care about them. In the end, it was really boring and not worth watching.