Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Cortechba Overrated

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Wuchak RELEASED IN 1970 and directed by Lewis Gilbert, "The Adventurers" chronicles the life of Dax Xenos (Bekim Fehmiu) who, as a little boy in 1945, witnesses the violent deaths of his mother & sister during a revolution in the fictional South American country Corteguay. Much later, as an ambassador's son in Rome, he's an emotionally cold playboy who marries solely for wealth (Candice Bergen), but he's haunted by Corteguay and maintains relations with the dubious dictator (Alan Badel). Ernest Borgnine plays Dax' spiritual guardian, Fat Cat.The movie's based on Harold Robbins' book of the same title, which was loosely based on the real-life Porfirio Rubirosa, an oft-married wealthy playboy, diplomat and polo player who had a relationship with the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo."The Adventurers" is a curious amalgamation of Hollywood soap opera (e.g. 1967's "Valley of the Dolls") and Italo-Western-like slaughter with a Euro-robot as the leading man. The movie vacillates between starving children in South America, disco-a-go-go fashion shows in Rome or New York, machine-gun massacres, hedonistic sex romps and the disingenuous courting of rich women. It's basically a wannabe "Doctor Zhivago" (1965), but lacking that iconic picture's surreal and compelling artistry.The spectacularly engineered battle sequences were created by the James Bond stunt-genius Bob Simmons, featuring hundreds of real men (played by actual Columbian militants), real tanks, real trains and real planes, all getting blown to pieces before your very eyes with absolutely no CGI.The above reveals many points of interest, but I was well into the second half of the almost-3-hour flick when I realized that none of the characters interested me, particularly the protagonist. I'm not sure if the problem was the script, the story or the actor (Fehmiu), but the drama came across consistently flat. Another problem is the women. While there are several notables besides Bergen (Olivia de Havilland, Leigh Taylor-Young, Delia Boccardo, Jaclyn Smith, etc.) the camera either never captures their beauty or they're too anorexic to fascinate in the first place. On the positive side, the action-packed conclusion is gripping and the message is timeless: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.THE FILM RUNS 2 hours, 57 minutes and was shot in Colombia (Cartagena & Bogota), Puerto Rico, Italy (Rome & Venice) and New York City.GRADE: C

Neil Doyle Except for the color cinematography of Claude Renoir, this sprawling story of a selfish playboy son of a South American diplomat who has been murdered, is nothing more than a revenge story told on a scale that would be impressive if the story was worthy of being treated as an epic. There are huge crowd scenes, many explosions, awkward love scenes, terrible dialog and just a few moments where you can see an occasional moment of truth.All of the actors are pretty well wasted and only occasionally is there a flash of good acting. The hero is played by BEKIM FEHMIU, a lean and muscular leading man who has only one expression no matter what the circumstances. His wooden performance seems to have affected everyone else in the cast, with the possible exception of OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND and JOHN IRELAND who at least acquit themselves without looking foolish.There's also a charming performance from LEIGH TAYLOR-YOUNG, but CANDICE BERGEN, ROSSANO BRAZZI, FERNANDO REY, ERNEST BORGNINE, ANNA MOFFO and others do nothing that raises the level of the film to anything more than pulp trash--which, considering that it came from a Harold Robbins novel, is all that it could ever hope to be.The striking photography cannot be praised too highly, but everything else crumbles under the heavy-handed direction of Lewis Gilbert. He never manages to make any of the characters appealing enough to really care about.Summing up: At your own risk.

Polaris_DiB Taking a look at the DVD case for this, you read a whole different text than what this movie actually is. The DVD case presents a movie that is a romantic action adventure, a children's movie (rated PG) or at least family movie about a hero who gets the girl and everything turns out all right in the end.This movie is rated PG.We open on a boy and his dog, idyllic, playful, nothing to worry about. The music is friendly, the colors are friendly, the land is friendly, everything is perfect. Then a gunshot rings out and the dog falls dead. The boy runs to a villa, where he watches his family get raped and murdered, all very bloody, violent, and horrifying (much like the same type of violence in A Clockwork Orange, actually).This movie is rated PG.We follow this boy's journey through life, not as an action adventure, but as an epic... the story of a man who, after the trauma of his family's near complete destruction, is sent away to Rome to escape the made-up South American land of Corteguay, where he transistions between being an adulterist playboy (much like a less liked and less proactive James Bond, which is interesting because the director made Moonraker), to an apathetic, bitter nigh-rapist, to the potential savior of Cortequay who is only used and abused by its leaders until he himself falls victim and nothing changes for the better.This movie is rated PG.We follow a whole melange of extra characters as they move through their either abused, poor life without happiness, or their empty, corrupted life as the rich, and how they all intermix and intermingle to create a land, Corteguay, that is constantly at war with itself, and how they all add to it their own violence.This movie is rated PG.We follow playboys into S&M dungeons (again, imagery very alike A Clockwork Orange), young boys becoming men by shooting down rows of prisoners with automatic machine guns, women without control of their independence, civil leaders claiming that "There must be a cohesion of evil and politics," revolutionaries who rape, pillage, plunder, and massacre; prostitute nuns, apathetic heroes, unstimulating sex (and lots of it), children getting killed, and the beauty of civilization and nature juxtaposed with explosions and grimacing Gothic architecture, idealistic moments ALWAYS ended suddenly with pronounced, crippling pain.This movie is rated PG.I'll go out on a limb here and say that it's probably likely nobody likes this movie. It's not likable. It's well done, but clocking in at just over 3 hours of watching the horrors of humanity being committed again and again while our unsympathetic hero has sex with everything with two legs and makes a living off of it... Even if it was marketed correctly, it wouldn't be approached correctly.--PolarisDiB

TM-2 I liked this movie when I first saw it in the UK. It was R rated and deserved to be. Definitely for mature audiences. Don't know why it was released as PG rated in US. Lost some of its mature content and bite as a result.