The Wages of Fear

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.

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.

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.