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Saturday, May 20, 2023

RONIN (1998)

Seriously overcooked car chase film (with intellectual pretensions and major Jean-Pierre Melville issues) sees director John Frankenheimer working hard to erase any memories of his last (Marlon Brando’s infamous ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU remake), but unable to make much sense of what’s basically a tricked up caper pic.*  A gaggle of international experts (robbers, ex-agents, computer whiz, demolition master), all outside the law, wait & plan in a chilly warehouse for Irish Boss Lady to start the mission: Cash Exchanged for Mystery Package.  (Shh . . . it’s a McGuffin!)  But since no one trusts anyone to be who they say they are or play straight, a nighttime handoff becomes a shootout, the shootout a spectacular car chase.  And damned if it doesn’t happen all over again, now in daylight with loads of collateral damage in a tourist-filled city.  Then, more of the same after the finale begins with a sizable lift out of Frankenheimer’s own classic THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’63.  Scripter David Mamet, like his characters hiding under an assumed name (Richard Weisz), must have thought he was turning GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS into a caper pic (actually, GGR kinda is a caper pic, no?), but hopefully found more than a McGuffin when he looked in his paycheck envelope.  (Hackdom has its rewards.)  Robert De Niro and Jean Reno are the sympathetic pair in the group, constantly surprised to find their partners have hidden agendas.  But only main villain Jonathan Pryce actually does anything surprising.  And while the CGI-free car chases are truly spectacular, they go on so long they start to feel disconnected from the film, unable to give off the afterglow of the more dramatically tethered classics in BULLITT/’68 or THE FRENCH CONNECTION/’71.  The latter’s unhappy sequel directed by a certain John Frankenheimer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Sure enough, RONIN a commercial disappointment while MOREAU tanking disastrously but not without interest.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-island-of-dr-moreau-1996.html

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