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I'd seen some good things about this one, but I was largely disappointed in "The Wonderful Country." First off, I applaud Robert Mitchum for stretching here: he plays a white Missourian raised in Mexico, his accent and even his posture a departure for Mitchum. The problem is, it just doesn't work. (That accent sure comes and goes!) The bigger problem is an unfocused (and rather hard to follow) screenplay that has Mitchum's Martin Brady running guns into Texas for the Mexican Castro family, recuperating there after a fall from his horse, then, after he kills a man, escaping back over the Rio Grande into Mexico. There's a spark with a married woman (Julie London's dissatisfied army wife, Helen Colton), meetings with rival Castro brothers... and, well, some more stuff which doesn't add up to quite enough in the end. Whether due to the accents and/or the sound recording, I found a significant amount of the dialogue simply hard to understand, and the story difficult to follow. But it also felt more than a little unfocused and rather dramatically inert, so that I found myself bored, which is one of the worst things I might say about a movie. Overall, maybe still worth a look for fans of classic Westerns, but mostly as a curiosity--an ambitious, if not exactly interesting, failure. (The Movie Czar 8/19/19)
score 4/10
simonqbb 19 August 2019
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5070252/ |
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25-9-2020 04:08:09