A parable of Gold Fever carrying the hopelessly humdrum moral that finding is better than having. ("Once I had it all," muses the former prospector and present world's wealthiest man. "Now I just have everything.") But this is a Nicolas Roeg movie, so nothing seems as simple as it is. The director comes through once again as the uncontested champion of pretentiously tarted-up middle-grade trash. The early gun-in-mouth suicide, with the spatter of brains juxtaposed (in the patented Roeg manner) with fireworks in the night sky, perhaps recalls the path of the bullet at the end of Performance or the autopsy sprinkled all throughout Bad Timing: Roeg, surely, has gone far beyond the likes of Peckinpah, from the mere graphic anatomical depiction of violence to the graphic metaphysical depiction of it. But the suicide, a sort of hors d'oeuvre, is nothing compared with the climactic murder. Hardly has the reclusive tycoon (Gene Hackman) passed through a wrought-iron gate that irrepressibly brings to mind Citizen Kane, than one of the hired assassins, to clinch the allusion, smashes an equivalent of the snow-scene paperweight and thus assures us that the end is at hand. And indeed somewhere amidst the bludgeon and the blowtorch and the machete -- a murder method that bespeaks the hand of the serious artist, possibly a devotee of Jacobean Tragedy or the Theater of Cruelty, rather than that of the mere gangster -- we may be sure that the man's lifelong motto ("It's not over till it's over") has decisively been fulfilled. Apart from those concentrated efforts, the movie dribbles by with amazingly little impact. Even the signature bits of kinky sex (Theresa Russell done up in some sort of gold bondage regalia or the Caribbean voodoo orgy, with its mixed races and species) are viewed at such distances from the camera that they can only have been exciting to those actually on the set. And the mannered cross-cutting, less purposeful than before, and by now as self-parodistic as Peckinpah (again) ever got to be, cannot generate interest when there is no interest in either of the spectacles between which the director happens to be cutting. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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