Reviews

I was inspired to watch this film (which I hadn't seen since it first came out) after reading a review of ZAZ's book on the making of same.

The 70s and 80s certainly were the golden age of politically incorrect humor and this picture is one of the best examples of that era, together with Blazing Saddles, guaranteed to offend the greatest number of groups who take themselves too seriously. And thank goodness for that.

The casting was brilliant, with strait-laced authority figures such as Peter Graves, Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen delivering their lines with utmost seriousness with hilarious results. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was perfect as the co-pilot with attitude.

However, the picture is too much a product of its times to be considered timeless and therefore is not perfect. How many people born after the movie was made would get June Cleaver (who?) speaking jive? Or what propeller planes sounded like? Religious cultists soliciting in airports ("we gave at the office")? Smoking after sex (or smoking at all)? Jiggle TV and gratuitous nudity? People who don't know who Stephen Stucker was are likely to be offended by his over-the-top antics. And people who weren't subjected to the tsunami of disaster movies of that era (Airports 1-4, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, etc., etc.) may well wonder why the picture was made at all.

This is a picture that Alfred Hitchcock might have made if he were alive today. An ordinary person comes into some dangerous knowledge and has to go on the run. Said ordinary person has issues. A McGuffin at the center of the plot. A nefarious collection of bad guys. Characters who turn out not to be what they seem be. A fast paced 90 minute run time. Flashes of sly humor.

The cinematography is stunning and reminded me of Carol Reed's The Third Man, with techno substituted for the zither.

All this would be for nothing if you didn't have a strong character at the core. And Zoe Kravitz fulfills that role magnificently. She's loaded with mental issues: agoraphobia, PTSD, OCD, germophobia. Not to mention a toothache. But she comes across as totally natural. There is a lot of subversive humor here, like when Angela changes the sheets after sex while the guy is still on the bed. Even the violence Angela evinces at the end is in character: she had been the victim of an assault, but she was prosecuted and not her assailant. So her killing two of the bad guys who had already been incapacitated was revenge not only on what they did to her but on the creep who had assaulted and traumatized her.

The movie isn't perfect; there are a lot of obvious plot devices. The weirdo incel stalker neighbor turns out not to be such a bad guy after all (although Angela has to rescue him and not the other way around). The overly sympathetic empty suit she turns to for help betrays her. And (holy coincidence, Batman!) she learns of the betrayal from a text perfectly timed to make her escape.

Finally, while the ending is viscerally satisfying, it is kind of ridiculous that Angela's multiple mental disorders are instantly cured by shooting 3 bad guys full of nails and watching the head corporate crook doing a perp walk. On the other hand, maybe that's part of the humor that runs through the picture.

I just can't understand how this ridiculous picture got an Oscar. The whole film is based on a single absurd premise: a self-made multimillionaire, a supposedly savvy businessman lets a bunch of grifters into his house without bothering to get a background check? Really? I'm willing to suspend disbelief when watching a movie, but that Grand Canyon-sized plot hole was just too big to overcome and colored my view of the whole picture. I kept on watching hoping to find out if there was something going to happen that would make me want to care about any of the characters. Didn't happen.

And that ridiculous Grand Guignol finale. Gallons of fake blood for no discernable reason does not a cinematic masterpiece make.

The two redeeming qualities of this picture are (1) seeing the most amazing aircraft of ww2 in flight and (2) the stirring theme music. Otherwise, the picture is riddled with plot holes, miscasting and other absurdities.

Germany was full of brilliant engineers and architects, so why would they build a vital factory under a mountain that was a landslide waiting to happen? How were the Mosquito pilots able the achieve pinpoint bombing accuracy by picking out their target by eye while flying at 290 mph? How were those Luftwaffe fighters in 1944 able to fly hundreds of miles through British radar and fighter squadrons to shoot up the airfield?

Cliff Robertson was a fine actor but he was too old to be playing a ww2 RAF pilot. A 40 year old RAF officer would be flying a desk, not one of the fastest aircraft then on the planet. Maybe he thought he could get away with it after playing a 26 year old JFK the year before. George Chakiris is hardly credible as a Norwegian. And Angus Lennie, as Scottish as haggis, playing a Cockney?

While Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives showed what a man who lost his hands could do, I seriously doubt the RAF would allow a man with a hook to fly in combat at that stage of the war (yes I know all about Douglas Bader, he was one of my childhood heroes). And couldn't the hairstylist at least give everybody a '40s look?

Bottom line, I loved watching the magnificent Mossie doing its thing, but the rest of the picture was a bust.