| |
|
In a word, no.
Now, I love Alex Cox: I even love the semi-improvised spaghetti-western boondoggle that is STRAIGHT TO HELL.
And I'd been doing some reading about the real William Walker, who was an incredibly amazing guy: He was a genuine polymath who'd been a practicing physician, lawyer, and journalist before the age of thirty; a democratic idealist who ended up a dictator. The newspapers of the time called him "The Man of Destiny," and had his work in Nicaragua succeeded, the US Civil War might well have been averted.
There's a fascinating film to be made of his life story: but Alex Cox did not make it. Of course Cox was never going to make a straight bio, but his attempt to link Walker's story with later US misadventures in Nicaraguais a clever idea in abstract, but really poorly done in practice.
And Cox's weaknesses as a director of actors are in full effect here: the characters are written as cardboard cutouts, and Cox seems to have encouraged everyone to simply bellow and grimace as much as is humanly possible.
To quote Roger Ebert: I hated, hated, hated this movie. One of the great blown opportunities of modern cinema, and quite literally unwatchable: I ened up fast-forwaring though great swathes of it on video, a practice which I usually deplore.
Your mileage, of course, may vary. |
|
|
