The Wages of Fear

For almost anyone who studied french in high school in Quebec in the 80s one of the standard books was "La Dynamite" about driving a truck with unstable nitroglycerine across treacherous terrain and bumpy roads.

This is basically that but with guns and over acting.

Now Georges Arnaud wrote "Le Salaire de la peur" in 1950 so it's more likely that our "La Dynamite" was a copy of that, but it was amusing.

Beyond that, it's not a great film, mediocre at best, but it is mindless late night viewing. Maybe it was because the story was so familiar in general but everything about this movie was overly predictable.

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.

This is another example of a minimum-effort remake by people who think they are being creative by changing elements from the source material so they can pat themselves on the back for their "creativity" rather than to better fit a carefully crafted retelling.

The original by Clouzot and remake by Friedkin are brilliant and should have been enough to inform the makers of this train wreck that they were out of their depth. Instead they forged ahead and proved they don't understand the story and characters or why the setting was just as important.

Instead of the Colombian jungle with dangers around every corner including cliff-side roads, fallen trees, rivers with sketchy bridges, wildlife, etc, they chose to set this in the middle of the boring desert with long stretches of flat, easily-traversed roads and nothing of interest to even look at.

The original opens with a hyper-patient study of the characters who will eventually take up the challenge, while Sorceror uses pre-Colombia vignettes to introduce the characters and their reasons for ending up together.

This one opens with a pounding score that can't save one of the most boring "action" sequences I've ever seen. It's shot like a Honda Civic commercial, but then becomes more laughable when one of the vehicles gets stuck on a small hump because the driver (and director) apparently don't realize they are in a 4WD truck (or understand how motor vehicles in general work). The other vehicle pulls up and they chat about needing to go, but driver 1 is adamant about not leaving behind the (pointless MacGuffin). The other driver takes off, but SURPRISE(?), circles around to push the other truck over the speed bump. So exciting...Not. Meanwhile, somehow the vehicle that was in hot pursuit is conveniently much farther back than was previously shown.

We get a boring shootout that is somehow resolved and then a sex scene that provides no character development and further demonstrates a complete unawareness by the writer and director of the setting in which they placed their "remake"

Yes, you read that right....just seven minutes into this movie and it was apparanetly clear how badly directed, written, edited and acted.

Editing First clue to a bad movie is when a very simple scene have multiple edits in just three seconds of scene. GUILTY. A chase scene was edited so badly that you did not know who were the good guys or bad guys.

Direction: The villain is only five seconds behind me, I ran off the road, get stuck, get pushed out and now the villain is about 30 seconds behind me. Stupid...just stupid. Oh, the the villain is steadily firing a machine gun and not hitting anything once.

Writing/Acting: I am about to lose my life and I rattle off a statement with the same emotion of ordering a soy latte.

Skip this movie.