A Breed Apart (Reviewed on Aug. 19th/98)
Starring Rutger Hauer, Powers Boothe, Kathleen Turner
"A Breed Apart" casts Rutger Hauer as a crazy, bird-loving recluse who picks his feathered friends over Kathleen Turner. A bit hard to swallow? That's only the first of many improbabilities in this film.
Hauer stars as a man obsessed with keeping the birds on his island safe, while Boothe plays a guy hired to steal a couple of rare eagle eggs by a rich egg collector. Turner is the woman caught between the two men.
"A Breed Apart" isn't a bad movie, exactly. Indeed, I found myself rooting for both the Hauer and Boothe characters, even though their goals couldn't be more different. The problem with the film is that there are just too many inconsistencies. For example, early on in the film, Hauer physically assaults two drunken rednecks shooting at "his" birds. Later on, the rednecks come back for revenge with four other people, and Hauer kills a few of them. I have a tough time believing that the police wouldn't get involved at that point.
Another problem is the silly love-triangle that develops. I didn't care one way or the other who ended up with Turner. I was more interested in finding out which of the two men would be victorious in their respective missions. However, despite this uninteresting sub-plot, Turner did manage to give a great performance as the woman who reminds the two men that sometimes there's more to life than money and birds.
As for Hauer, he's an actor I've always admired. He has a penchant for picking strange and unusual characters. And this one is no exception. He's frequently seen riding around his island on a white horse, wearing pirate's clothing, and holstering a cross-bow. Despite all his eccentric mannerisms, though, Hauer always manages to let the human side of his character shine through. For example, there's a scene in which he barks at Turner and her son because they came onto his island a day early. He comes off as crazy loner in that scene, but a few minutes later, he is apologizing to Turner, and we believe his intentions. Soon after, we find out he's a Vietnam vet, and his actions become fairly clear to us.
"A Breed Apart" isn't a great movie by any means, but it does contain good performances by all three leads, and it's worth seeing for that reason alone.
*** out of ****
Dave "Loopy" Nusair dnusair@chat.carleton.ca
; "The Artist Formally Known As Prince is now going by just The Artist. ; : Despite this, I will still refer to him as The Fruit." : ; -Norm MacDonald ;
Dept. of Good Vibes, Come visit my Reel Film Reviews site Carleton University at "http://chat.carleton.ca/~dnusair"
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