John Boorman has long shown a fine eye in concert with an unfine mind. And even in so half-hearted and half-baked an effort as this one, the wide, deep, full, lush, colorful, teeming, sudoriferous images form an impressive parade. But the typical disparity between eye and mind in a Boorman movie (cf. Deliverance, Zardoz, Exorcist II, Excalibur) is all the more glaring in this one, because the subject matter is superficially so "serious," so "important," so "deep." In other words, so real, factual, newsworthy. Namely, the bloody military crackdown in Burma ca. 1988. In actual practice, the "depth" in the movie is a very sometime thing: the swift and uncomplicated and modestly scaled adventure story stopping dead in its tracks, just long enough for Boorman to plant a signpost of Heavy Thought. The psychological wounds of the heroine — she's on vacation to distance herself from the violent deaths of her husband and child, when she runs smack into violence and death anew and aplenty — are supposed to provide an additional degree of depth, but really it's little more than the sinkage from excess baggage. Patricia Arquette, U Aung Ko, Frances McDormand. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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