Okay, so I think William Friedkin was in certain ways a fabulous film maker. Certainly The French Connection and To Live and Die in LA are landmarks, and the Exorcist, well either you like it or you don’t (it never did much for me) but you can’t deny it broke ground and was very influential.

Problem is he didn’t do that many films in his prime, so when I realized that he shot a bizarre 1970s film about 4 criminals hiding in Columbia who agree to transport old, unstable nitroglycerin across 200 miles of mountains terrain in exchange for citizenship, well I had to give it a try of course!!!

Here’s the deal with this film. It looks incredible. I would recommend this film to anyone who really wants an example of what has been lost with all the CGI bullshit in films these days. There is an intense visual realism that is very exciting to watch. The “trucks on the rope bridge” scene is unbelievable!!! You can scarcely breathe while you watch it – it is a monument to real film artistry. Freidkin makes all the mundane stuff look incredible too – Friedkin can make a shot of people simply getting out of a car look exciting. It’s a gift, one that is worth our time to appreciate, I think.

But … the problem is that the film is rather boring. It is hard to stick with the film in the beginning, REALLY hard. And then, while the actual transport is fabulous looking, the actors don’t really talk to each other, which makes it rather dull. They’re just moving the shit across the mountains in silence, so after a while it’s like “So what? Why do I care, again?” This problem is compounded by the fact that they are all scumbag criminals, so it seems a bit much to expect us to automatically care if they make it alive, considering that they are so loathsome. Lack of character development does in yet another movie.

I’d say, if you have nothing to do, you might watch it just to see Friedkin’s craftwork. But don’t expect too much, plot-wise or dialog-wise. Come to think of it, don’t expect anything at all.