salem_ok

Well this movie brings a big question to me. Why did they do it? With a director, that has been good although irregular. He seems to have done it without caring much about his movie. The actors are very bad, especially Keith Carradine, who acts like a robot, and gives no feeling to his role. They look as if they're asking themselves what they are doing here, and overplay, in a totally not realistic way. The lights, filming, and style of the film, is outdated, of course, but it's outdated in a way that makes it dull. Many movies of the eighties still look good, but this one, just looks old. It seems that Fuller wanted his movie to look modern, but in fact, he was overwhelmed by the era he was living in at the time, he didn't understood what were the times he was living, like a poor old guy, hanging to his old ideas. So his movies doesn't look either modern or timeless. Maybe the book was good, but this strange mix of French and American actors, French team and American director is a total failure.

This movie is excellent at both extremities but dull in the middle. The first 5 minutes are really impressive and very fast paced but they fail to set the story in place.

Then the film falls asleep until the manga/street fighter like finale except maybe for one remarkable scene of scatologic torture. The ingredients of the scenario are the good ones for a mobster movie but they're just stacked in a way where it's almost impossible to feel the slightest interest for it...

It looks like the directors wanted absolutely to make a shocking and violent movie, but unfortunately fails for the majority of the film's length.