User Reviews

This handsome looking Merchant Ivory film is great for its exotic visuals and location footage, some of it remarkably cinematic and glorious from that perspective. This is based on the legend of the Indian cult of the Thuggee, documented in other films and dealt with in detail here. The handsome Pierce Brosnan is rugged and brave as a British officer out to expose those in charge of this brutal cult, and when he does a series of arrests, he is forced to resign and thus decides to go in Disguise to complete his duty. Putting on brown makeup and not shaving for days, he doesn't feel the audience but manages to full members of this violent group whose methods of murder are quite vile.

A major flop in 1988, this apparently gets a little business that it slipped into a level beyond obscurity. Brosnan is quite believable in his British uniform, but he looks ridiculous in the makeup and not at all like an Indian peasant who would strangle on orders and take the famous sugar that makes the taker vulnerable to the female goddess that this cult worships. When they show a corpse of one of the victims, it is obvious that there was more than just strangling going on, and a few of these crimes are quite graphic in detail. It's a shame that this film is not better known as it is quite sumptuous to look at, but it's missing a certain element to make it completely successful. Obviously very little expense was spared so the production values are superior, almost epic like in scope. But information about the movie outside of general resources makes it almost appear that this was straight to video even though it did have a very brief theatrical release.

"Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." - Edward Said

"The Deceivers" is a poor film by the usually reliable Nicholas Meyer. Whitewashing the actions of the British Empire within Asia, the film is set in 1820s India and stars Pierce Brosnan as Captain William Savage, a tax collector for the British East India Company. As the Thuggees, a Kali-worshipping cult, have been committing robberies and mass, ritualistic murders, Savage infiltrates the group and attempts to put an end to their crimes.

Nicholas Meyer's not an idiot. His film clearly attempts to attack the paternalistic, condescending and bloody attitudes of the British Empire, which, largely in collusion with private mercantile corporations, would result in the indirect or direct deaths of over a billion Indians across a roughly 2 century period.

And so "The Deceivers" initially portrays Savage as the poster-boy for "liberal enlightenment". He's a "good Imperialist", a "good tax collector", who has many Indian friends and speaks several local languages. Once he infiltrates the cult, however, Savage "becomes a savage". Savage not only puts on brown face-paint in an attempt to go undercover and so infiltrate the cult, but he "literally reveals himself to have always been a barbarian" who enjoys murder, death and sexual debauchery. Under the facade of the civilised white man, Meyer thus says, is third world primitivism. Is a monster adept at deceiving itself. These themes are made clearest during sequences in which Meyer cuts between Thuggee rituals and Savage's memories of Western church ceremonies, no less a form of primitive superstition.

Whilst such themes may work in David Lean's "A Passage to India", they don't work at all in "The Deceivers". The film's stance – beneath "civilised" Europe lurks the barbarism of the "native" - is sophomoric, dilutes the larger aims and horrors of Imperialism, and has the unintentional effect of demonizing the Indians. The film also unintentionally validates an old Victorian trope: the idea that the Empire, for all its problems, was nevertheless necessary for taming the native, the frontier and conflicting groups. The Empire, then, brought order.

Whilst it is true that the Empire did bring a type of order (it crushed many monarchs and gangs), it also practised divide and conquer, sowed disorder and fuelled rivalries. Similarly, the "peaceful order" it brought was pretty undesirable. Most of the regions ruled by the British at the time only got worse. West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, East Bengal etc were the poorest, most lawless states, ridden with ethnic conflicts and disease. Even today, these parts lag behind the rest of contemporary India. Those places once ruled by Indian monarchs during the 1700s and 1800s (Travancore-Cochin, Mysore, Hyderabad, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab-Haryana etc), in contrast, now exhibit stronger economic and social progress. In short, European colonialists were much more adept at exploitation and extraction than local feudalists.

The name Thuggee comes from the Sanskrit word for "deceiver". In the 1830s the group is said to have killed about 30,000 people. Historians like Martine van Woerkens ("Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India"), however, have contested much of the mythology ascribed to the Thuggees. Many see the group as being largely a product of "colonial imaginings": British fears of the little-known interior of India. Afterall, the British in India found themselves culturally isolated. Most had grown up in an England where public meetings were illegal and where the faintest hint of social gatherings or secret brotherhoods were sufficient to arouse draconian reactions. A combination of paranoia, authoritarian instincts and religious intolerance thus gave way to a kind of militant zeal for Thugg-bashing. Even historians who agree that the Thuggees were real and genuinely responsible for mass murders, like Mike Dash, reject the colonial emphasis on religiously motivated crimes, and instead asserts that monetary gain was the main motivation for Thuggee murders; the gangs were in extreme poverty, and were a natural result of British rule in India (and the economic realities generated by the Empire's opium trade).

"The Deceivers" is poorly shot and never convincingly captures the tempo, look or feel of 19th century India. The attitudes, mannerisms and dialogue of virtually all of Meyer's cast also rings false. Elsewhere the film struggles to reconcile two goals: being a Victorian boy's adventure (which were typically racist and paternalistic), and being a politically correct condemnation of Empire. Meyer would attempt similar themes with "Star Trek 6: An Undiscovered Country".

5/10 - See "A Passage to India", "North West Frontier" and Satyajit Ray's "The Chessplayer".

Good production values, but here and as usual, these David-Lean-wannabes Merchant & Ivory tend to be pretentious (The Remains of the Day) when not downright pathetic (Le Divorce).

Good photography and a good recreation of the early XIXth century India, but probably is there where all verosimilitude ends. The hollywoodesque daring escape of the hero when surrounded by a multitude of thugs and his last minute rescue by the requisite cavalry regiment; his appropriate delivery of justice by his own hand or the betrayal by an unsuspecting friend indicate that the whole thing was 99% fiction (one Amazon reviewer even reports that the thugs never existed in reality).

You also have to suspend disbelief on the thugs accepting Pierce Brosnan (or any British officer) as one of their own. Let alone the impossibility of avoiding speaking with an accent when talking a foreign language; think of the colour of the skin (at one point, Brosnan is naked before a thug, who notices nothing) or the many cultural details a foreigner cannot possibly know, which could spell disaster any minute.

Many subplots (the seemingly ominous butler, the comrade-on-arms that tries to seduce the hero's wife and turns out to be something else) lead nowhere, suggesting the producers were trying to fill the 98 minutes with anything. Similarly, the film drags for the first twenty minutes until it starts moving.

The story is also handicapped with a tribute to extrasensorial nonsense: "I've seen your husband in my dreams, and he is in danger" says an Indian character, and the wife acts upon that --apparently reliable-- orientalism.

Summing up: the film is good and moderately entertaining, but it could be much better. They could have omitted the "based on a true story part" since probably the only factual bit was that in 1825 there was a country called India, with British soldiers riding around wearing funny hats.

Don't let the fact that this is a Merchant Ivory production put you off in any way. There's little delicacy, intuition, or nuance in this colonial adventure story.

As everyone knows by now -- everyone who has seen "Gunga Din" at any rate, which is everyone -- the Thugs were a sect in India who strangled their victims after digging their graves. "Gunga Din" tells us that they worshiped Kali, who stood for destruction, but it doesn't tell us that their favorite way of acquiring victims was in posing as frightened proletarians and joining the caravans that offered them protection in dangerous country. They may have worshiped Kali but they had nothing against robbing the caravans after murdering its members. They were something like organized American gangsters -- the Mafia or Murder Incorporated -- if the American gangsters have worshiped their own god. Needless to say, in 1840, when the British East India Company more or less ruled India, with the army as its instrument, this was a noisome situation.

Lots of potential here. It almost calls for Errol Flynn. The Indians wear familiar garb and some of the customs are known to us -- suttee, for instance. But there's a touch of authenticity in the British uniforms. What outlandish caps -- like upside-down vases! The film is undone by clumsy writing and direction that is pedestrian and commercial. In the opening scene, a small camp of British soldiers is quietly wiped out, off screen. The lone officer who survives is waked up by the quiet, steps out into the night, looks around at the handful of corpses, fires a shot at a noise in the jungle, and then the camera rolls in for a gargantuan close up of the officer's face in an expression of shock and surprise. His eyes bulge, his mouth drops open, his tongue lolls -- and we don't know if he's just been stabbed or strangled or had a wetting accident. End of scene. Writing and direction that is that careless needs something close to being sacrificially burned.

That scene is just an example. I don't mean that it's a terrible movie. Heck, those flamboyant hats alone might make it worth watching. It's just that, if most recent Merchant Ivory productions are exercises in sluggish elegance, this one leans too far in the other direction. Not enough advantage is taken of the location shooting. I hate to say something like watch "A Passage to India" to get some idea of how fruitful staging can add quality to a film -- but watch "A Passage to India" to see. Or even "Kama Sutra", a far lesser film, in which you can almost smell the incense. There's a hunt for a wounded tiger here that lands with a thud. It's hard to screw up a hunt for a wounded tiger but there's simply no suspense in the scene. On the plus side, the writer and director didn't shy away from the realities accompanying death in the tropics. The flies buzz all over the place. The performances aren't bad either.