THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS
A film review by Rick Pali
Copyright 1997 Rick Pali
Supposedly based on a true story in which the British drive to build a rail bridge deep in Africa grinds to a halt after a pair of lions start killing off the workers in 1898. John Patterson (Val Kilmer), the bridge building expert set to oversee the operation, tried to rid his operation of the lions, but fails. A world renound hunter, Remington (Michael Douglas), is called in and the battle, man against lion, begins.
This film has a great soundtrack, and wonderful scenery. The acting is not too bad except the characters are all so thin. We only see one side of each character. Kilmer is a bridge builder and that's all we see him as. These lions kill dozens of his men and he doesn't even appear to be too upset about it.
And the plot? It's Jaws, but with lions. Again we're presented with an animal that behaves not at all as it should. It appears to kill men because it just likes too. Why? Who knows. I guess there wouldn't be much of a story if it didn't. The problem is that there isn't much of a story even though it does.
** (out of five) --- http://www3.sympatico.ca/rpali/
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