Reviews

Ick.

The first movie, Bourne Identity, was at least remotely connected to the book at the beginning.

This one has nothing whatever to do with Bourne Supremacy.

SPOILERS .

Marie is Canadien. As of the most recent novel, she's alive and she and "Jason Bourne" have kids.

There was never any character named Ward Abbott.

Conklin was never killed.

"Jason Bourne", whose name was revealed to be David Webb by the end of the first book, was never programmed to kill anyone.

There was no Pamela Landy.

Half of what's in the novels takes place in Asia. The movies are hooked on Western Europe, for some reason.

With all that in mind, the first movie was at least fun.

This one starts out grim and gets worse. It also taxes credibility. A super-spy could be that good, perhaps (how are most of us going to know?), but nobody keeps walking away from car crashes that kill everyone else.

If you don't like bad endings and lots of innocent people getting killed, stay away from this.

The next novel in the series is called the Borune Ultimatum. Goodness knows what the plot will be. Everyone in the novel except the hero is dead.

This movie made me sick when I saw it on TV many years ago. Jeff Chandler's character is decent, a guy you don't want to see taken down? He says to Fess Parker's character, regarding the way he treated the man's dead (at his hands) wife, "To me, a good woman is like a good bottle of wine: once you've used it up, you throw the container away." He goes through women like kleenexes and disposes of them with less mercy. He took the man's wife, seduced her, then killed her when he got bored with her.

This is decent?

Fess Parker's character likes him?

There is no reason for Fess Parker not to kill the disgusting creep on sight.

But maybe the people who praise this movie also agree with that characterization of women.

Okay, so Bruce Willis has never been sick or hurt.

Samuel L Jackson has spent his entire life both sick and hurt. We don't know just how sick he is. The bone disease is the least of it.

SLJ tells Bruce that he's been reading newspapers about horrific accidents all his life in search of one that has only one survivor. That will be the super hero.

SLJ spends must of the movie in the role of the seer who finds the hero who will save the world. Even says so.

Bruce is ever-so-healthy and can bench 350 or something (we're clearly not talking sup strength here, since very few comic book heroes have trouble with less than 800) and can sense when a person has done something evil. (Anyone think of Spider-Man?)

Drag slowly along the story waiting for Bruce to start doing super hero stuff.

With about 10 minutes left in this VERY grim movie, Bruce finally does his thing, though the crime is not stopped until some people are already dead.

Then M Night Shyamalan does HIS thing:

SLJ sought his "sole survivor" not merely by following the news for fatal massive accidents but by CAUSING them. He has murdered thousands of people just to find that super hero.

This is NOT a comic book movie.

This is another M Night Shyamalan "GOTCHA" making the audience feel like puking at the last moment. The story seems to be not that there's a hero in everyone but that a psychotic mass murderer can turn up just when we were all enjoying a happy ending.

My comment is not so much about the movie as about those who call the "bathtub scene" sexy. This was supposedly an incestuous scene and it is somehow sexy?

As it turns out there was no incest, but the characters thought there was.

And the man was tried for it.

The movie may have stunk -- though Cannes loved it, Rex Reed loved it and Pia Zadora was never so good (yes, well) -- but at least a predator was portrayed having to answer for his crimes. Sort of.

One wnoders what Orson Wells and Stacy Keach were thinking. They both had careers. But then Mickey Rooney was in some hortrible movies, as well.

I found this movie intriguing as I watched it the first time. I wondered what the diagnosis (es) could be. I wondered how the two doctors could possibly figure out what Nell's life had been.

Then I looked back on it. There was never a diagnosis because none of it makes any sense. They didn't make a through search of her house as soon as they could? They can learn her language but she can't learn theirs? A group of behavioral psychologist ignore three months of tape in the patient's native environment and make determinations based on a few hours in an observation room? Nell, catatonic for days, suddenly communicates in a courtroom and starts to think in abstract terms with a new and mispronounced vocabulary? She learned limited language from her mother, who spoke with a southern drawl marred by strokes, but she can't learn a new word until . . . when?

I don't think this was intended to be seen as a true story, or even a believable one, but it didn't make sense to me. With this cast and this much trouble over the setting, I would have expected realism.

Yes, folks, this is a sequel to Mandingo. Ken Norton portrays his own son.

Ironic in the extreme.

Now, assuming that we all know this was never intended to be a mainstream motion picture -- come on, just look at the cast -- and can put aside any such expectations . . .

This really is a decent movie. Maybe I saw one that was edited to pieces, as Caligula was before it saw an American audience. There is what appears to be gratuitous nudity, but it's largely a party at a whorehouse. There'sd either going to be nudity or a scene that isn't credible. No sex going on, just topless women -- for the most part, a few bare behinds -- and most of these look like the caucasian version of the old National Geographics. Ick.

Anyone who thinks this movie is homophobic is ignoring the relationship between the madame and her female slave. John Collicos is disgusting but not because he's gay. He's just appropriately disgusting.

Ken Norton . . . this man made Mandingo and Drum after he broke Muhammed Ali's jaw but before he became a competent heavyweight. He was never more than competent but he was no worse in this role than anyone else was in theirs.

Pam Grier is the only woman with a recognizable name and she was only in one real movie. I hated Jackie Brown but I seem to be the only one.

Warren Oates, like John Collicos, played his part as if he was doing it for a living. It's hard to tell how realistic a sympathetic slaver is or how sympathetic a realistic slave owner is. At least his accent is genuine.

As for the content, it looks the way it should look. It's rarely pretty, even the parts where the audience may have been expecting it to be. The prostitutes are anatomically correct but not attractive.

I'd like to see Mandingo for the rest of the story.

Nobody should take this review seriously because all I know of Drum is the cast and the plot.

Any movie that had Ken Norton in the lead invites this sort of criticism.

Supposedly this movie is the sequel to Mandingo. Didn't Ken Norton die at the end of Mandingo? Doesn't that kind of prohibit him from being in the sequel apart from flash backs and such?

Okay.

Warren Oates plays the part Perry Kind had in Mandingo. At least one reviewer insists that this is okay because the story takes place 15 years later.

Well, if one character returns as his unrelated but identical twin, what the heck.

I understand that this movie is by turns realistic, sick, funny, has too much nudity, has not enough nudity . . .

Folks, back up. This movie has Ken Norton in the lead. Does anything else need to be said? Anyone who takes it seriously deserves what they get.

This is not, in my opinion, an action movie. It is not a thriller. One would think that a movie about a hit-person/assassin/whatever would have to be one or the other. This is a very grim drama. Darryl Hannah has been a professional killer for a while. Then she decides she'd really rather not kill this guy or his pregnant girlfriend. She'd also rather keep her own baby.

I quit watching the movie when Darryl had been shot by the guy and he'd been shot by her and is dragging himself back to his girl while bleeding to death. I didn't see how this movie could have a satisfying ending.

If I knew anything about people in this sort of life, I'd guess this was their version of reality tv.

It seemed very realistic to me, though it probably wasn't. The acting was appropriate.

I thought at the time that this movie was slapped together to take advantage of the popularity of Bo Derek. Since she is topless during the credits, there is no real point in staying for the movie itself.

I bet Shirley McLean felt the same way. She doesn't seem to care for the movie any more than I did.

Anthony Hopkins was nobody in particular back then and did nothing to help his career.

Ed Winter, pardon any mispelling, was known for being Col Flag on MASH. He's still known for that, if even for that.

Everyone ends this movie being happy except Anthony Hopkins, who wanted to keep his options open. The audience is happy because they can go home if they haven't already left.

I stayed because I thought it had to get better. I was very naive.

Another reviewer called this the "ripest". Ripe also means odoriferous, doesn't it?

I'm not sure it's possible to watch a Steve Reeves movie and be surprised at how bad it is. Isn't that like going into a public bathroom and having the same reaction? It simply isn't fair. Of COURSE it's terrible! That's the whole idea! It's supposed to be bad to the point of being funny. Does a movie studio hire a bodybuilder to star in dubbed Italian movies in order to produce dramatic art?

I wanted to be built like Steve Reeves when I was not-quite-10, also. I didn't get the height but I got the rest after 17 years of lifting weights. It's a pity that movie studios are no longer sticking bodybuilders into bad films and slapping the whole mess into eager theaters.

Wait a minute . . .

Johnny Weissmuller is Tarzan. Tarzan is Johnny Weissmuller.

A lot of people didn't know about Edgar Rice Burroughs when Johnny Weissmuller made Tarzan famous, and vice-versa, and provided future careers for a lot of people who could not act at all but could look okay in small costumes.

JW was huge and athletic long before there were any real bodybuilders to do this sort of role. There were lots of stock players available to come on screen and make him look even bigger and more athletic.

All he had to do was swim, parade around in his bit of cloth and smile at Maureen O'Sullivan.

And 40 years later, elementary school kids were still saying, "You talk like Tarzan, walk like Jane and smell like Cheetah."

A great many kids had no idea that a fight between a lion and a tiger could not have happened since the two animals lived on different continents.

I saw this movie back when I felt that I should watch a movie all the way through mo matter how horrible it made me feel.

And even so I couldn't watch the whole thing.

This is serious art, which I can't stand, very educational, which I also can't stand, and very important, which I also . . .

I wonder how many well-made movies involve both female nudity and pedophilia.

This is a growing-up story involving sexual abuse by a priest -- long before the truth was generally known -- and pining after a girl who turns out to be more than willing.

Okay, not exactly a narrative review so far, right? Well, this is much the way the molvie itself runs.

It is rather like the Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Kiefer Sutherland always had greatness in him. It is a pity that between this movie and 24 he played grimy killers.

Anyway, if you want two hours (or whatever) of fun, don't watch this. If you prefer a long stretch of very real psychological torment -- and there are many who do, or there would be no Cannes Film Festival -- that will still have you thinking 20 years later and still waiting to exhale, this is one way to go.

A man who really knows how to fight will always beat another man who is just big.

That sums up the encounter between Tracey and Earnest Borgnine as well as the whole movie.

Robert Ryan cannot beat Spencer Tracey because he's scared to death of him and has forgotten how to fight anyone who fights back, assuming he ever knew.

Spencer Tracey, having lost an arm in a war that saw a lot of old men in combat because there was no rule against it, show up in this place to give a medal to a person who deserves it and, as I remember, plans to kill himself afterwards. He's lost an arm and sees no future. Then he easily beats first Earnest Borgnine and then every other cowardly bully in the town.

He decides to go on with his life because his remaining arm seems to work fine.

Could this happen in real life? Who's going to be paying enough attention to find out? Nobody cares what happens in a place like Black Rock unless the good guy loses, as happens so often in racist places.

Spencer Tracey must have hated this movie. He sure played the part as if he hated it, and I can hardly blame him. His captain is an angry man who hates all his passengers except Gene Tierney, whom he seduces away from her husband. This may be realistic, though it's difficlut to tell. Would a Puritan woman have been so repressed that she goes for a rough man like the captain instead of her equally repressed husband? So she makes everyone thorougly miserable by killing herself. I can't remember whether this is before or after the passengers throw a party for the captain, who made no secret of the fact that he'd really rather they'd all drowned. All except Gene Tierney, of course.

I wonder whether Spencer Tracey was as angry as the captain or as bored as the audience. We all have different tastes. I don't think suicide is in the least romantic, but an awful lot of people do.