MEDICINE MAN (1992)
A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2003
In early 1990s few people could have imagined that John McTiernan, the author of such Hollywood classics like PREDATOR and DIE HARD, would sink to the levels of last year's ROLLERBALL. But even in those times McTiernan's career showed potential for going downhill, and one of the examples could be found in MEDICINE MAN, his 1992 environmentalist epic.
The protagonist of the film is an eccentric scientist Jonathan Campbell (played by Sean Connery). Six years ago he was intrigued by the fact that obscure Indian tribe in the heart of Amazonian rain forest had never heard of cancer. So he came there, set up the laboratory and began long and difficult quest for the substance that could provide the answer and serve as a possible cure for the disease. Campbell has finally managed to extract the right serum from the endemic local plants, but when Dr. Rae Crane (played by Lorraine Bracco), another scientist, comes to supervise his work, it turns out that the serum isn't working anymore. To make things even worse, Crane and Campbell doesn't seem to like each very much, but the events soon force them to settle their differences. New road is about to be built through the rain forest, and the upcoming destruction of trees and local ecology threatens to wipe out potential life-saving medicine from the face of the Earth.
Critics didn't particularly like MEDICINE MAN, while the audience showed somewhat more enthusiasm. The latter can be explained with the fact that the movie came to theatres in 1992 - at the zenith of "political correctness" hysteria, when all things environmental were fashionable. John McTiernan, on the other hand, felt personally obligated to make this film after re-visiting the sets of PREDATOR and seeing environmental damage to the local jungles. This doesn't mean that the tone of the film is too preachy or too heavy handed. For most part, MEDICINE MAN looks like a classic adventure story or modern-day version of THE AFRICAN QUEEN. Sean Connery handles his role of eccentric scientist very well, while Lorraine Bracco provides a lot of humour and has quite a lot of chemistry with Connery. Donald McAlpine's photography and James Goldsmith's effective score make MEDICINE MAN a very pleasant viewing experience. The wrong thing in this picture is the script by Tom Schulman and Sally Robinson - it is full of implausible plot elements, it lacks the proper drama and the ending is particularly weak (with some McTiernan's directing solutions making MEDICINE MAN look cheaper than it actually is). The magic of PREDATOR and DIE HARD began to leave McTiernan at this point, but, despite that, MEDICINE MAN is a film that won't represent the waste of time to those who watch it.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
Review written on January 29th 2003
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://www.purger.com/users/drax/reviews.htm - Movie Reviews in English http://www.ofcs.org - Online Film Critics Society
========== X-RAMR-ID: 33984 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 837322 X-RT-TitleID: 1038176 X-RT-AuthorID: 1307 X-RT-RatingText: 5/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews