Watched this at the weekend for the second time (I first saw it in the mid-1990s, but could remember very little about it apart from the fact that it was pretty good).
It's a real Saturday night special which is best watched with a few cans; sadly, I am on the wagon for the month of August. Powers Boothe is fantastic as the Texan who acts as cool as Steve Silvermint but, underneath it all, is as shit-scared as the rest of them. Keith Carradine has cheekbones sharp enough to cut your steak with -- from the neck up, he looks like a refugee from T Rex.
One or two of the plot developments have an air of telegraphed inevitability about them, but the basic story is strong enough to keep you sitting upright all the way to the end. The cinematography in the swamps is impressive, you can almost taste the dampness and the mud. Ry Cooder's blues score is great too.
Walter Hill's career seems to have fallen into the abyss in recent years, but back in the early 1980s he knew his way around a thriller and this is one of his best.
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********* SPOILER *********
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The ending is handled really strangely -- the two lads stumble out of the Cajun village and see a truck coming up the road, but for some reason Hill makes weird use of slow-motion and freeze-frame shots to convey the fact that it is a US Army vehicle coming to rescue them. Then the film simply ends before the truck even reaches them.
It's a real Saturday night special which is best watched with a few cans; sadly, I am on the wagon for the month of August. Powers Boothe is fantastic as the Texan who acts as cool as Steve Silvermint but, underneath it all, is as shit-scared as the rest of them. Keith Carradine has cheekbones sharp enough to cut your steak with -- from the neck up, he looks like a refugee from T Rex.
One or two of the plot developments have an air of telegraphed inevitability about them, but the basic story is strong enough to keep you sitting upright all the way to the end. The cinematography in the swamps is impressive, you can almost taste the dampness and the mud. Ry Cooder's blues score is great too.
Walter Hill's career seems to have fallen into the abyss in recent years, but back in the early 1980s he knew his way around a thriller and this is one of his best.
**************************
********* SPOILER *********
**************************
The ending is handled really strangely -- the two lads stumble out of the Cajun village and see a truck coming up the road, but for some reason Hill makes weird use of slow-motion and freeze-frame shots to convey the fact that it is a US Army vehicle coming to rescue them. Then the film simply ends before the truck even reaches them.
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