ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Mr-Fusion Harrison Ford is often described as a movie star rather than an actor, but "The Mosquito Coast" easily disproves that (actually, so does "Blade Runner", but I digress). It's a fevered performance on which the whole film rests. Easily worth a watch.But it also demands a lot from the audience. For one, there's an undercurrent of dread that's there right from the start and it's hard to watch Ford's mercurial character drag his family to the far ends of the jungle essentially to reboot civilization (a myopic one, at that). All I could think of was my family in that situation (hell, no).I'm not going to lie, this is a hard movie, rife with misfortune; on occasions shocking, infuriating and exhausting. But I was glued to my seat until the very end, primarily because of Ford's deteriorating mental state. That's a house of horrors unto itself. This is a well-directed movie but man if it's not wearing.

paul2001sw-1 There's a touch of John Galt about Harrison Ford's protagonist in 'The Mosquito Coast': a brilliant, welfare-hating, atheistic inventor who retires from a civilised world full of moochers and looters and consequently doomed to collapse. He (and the film) also seem to share Ayn Rand's view of a world not occupied by Europeans as a virgin territory. Yet the film shifts from portraying him as a Randian hero to something rather less attractive; and odd moments towards the end reminded me of Andrey Zvyagintsev's superb 'The Return', albeit without the subtlety. Subtlety is really the key here: the film needs to show how the character's final descent is a natural consequence of his worldview, not some random madness; but Harrison Ford lacks the depth as an actor to pull this off. A young Helen Mirren co-stars, but the film is fundamentally all about Ford, and he can't fully convey the darkness of the man. It's a shame: there's a good (although somewhat fabulous) parable in the underlying storyline.

DarthBill PLOT IN A NUTSHELL: Allie Fox (Harrison Ford), an eccentric intellectual, engineer and inventor, is very unhappy with how life in America is going. In fact, he hates it so much that he uproots his family from their nice little home in the middle of anywhere is America to a jungle where he proceeds to build his own idealized utopia, complete with a giant ice maker he calls "Fat Boy". For a brief time the restless Fox is happy and content, but his utopia is doomed to fail, leading to death, destruction, despair, and ruin. At the time it was released in 1986 director Peter Weir's "The Mosquito Coast" (based on the novel of the same name) got an at best mixed critical response and was a box office failure. Some believed it was because the film just wasn't "box office" material for the average American audience. Most however believed that the film failed due to the presence of Harrison Ford as Allie Fox - a role that, not surprisingly, had been offered to Jack Nicholson before Ford signed on. In the big scheme of the Hollywood game Ford built his career on playing sarcastic yet affable action heroes in big adventure films and thrillers, and by that point he had cemented his place as a pop culture icon with not one but two such roles - lovable rogue Han Solo from Star Wars and rugged archaeologist Indiana Jones. Ford had had some trouble gaining recognition for dramatic roles and had only just recently won praise for his role as a cop on the run in 1985's "Witness" also directed by Peter Weir (as of this writing "Witness" is still the only film where Ford was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar), and was looking for something different when "The Mosquito Coast" came his way. Its' easy to see what drew Ford to the part - Allie Fox was about as far removed from his two most iconic roles - and regular parts - as any part could be, and he was such an unusual, offbeat character, the kind that come along once in a lifetime, that it was simply too good to pass up (Ford has even confessed that he agreed with at least some of the character's criticisms about Americans not working hard enough and selling out their values). And therein lay the danger - after years of watching Ford save the day, either from Nazis or an evil intergalactic Empire, audiences just weren't ready to see him playing such an unsympathetic character. Which is too bad since this is quite possibly Ford's most dynamic performance, and certainly deserving of an Oscar nomination (Lord knows that lesser actors have won Oscars for lesser performances in lesser films). Ford embraces the unapologetic, self-destructive nature of the always critical Allie Fox with an unabashed go for broke energy that keeps the film charged from start to finish, and he is surrounded by an excellent cast, including the late River Phoenix as his oldest son (Phoenix later played the young version of Ford in 1989's "Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade"). Despite the terrible things Fox does in the name of his dream, even after that dream has obviously failed, Ford finds a way to make you feel sorry for him. "The Mosquito Coast" is a fascinating examination of how far a man will go to achieve his goal, as strange as that goal is, and a clash of ideologies (as seen in Fox clashing with the Reverend) and the ever fragile nature of family. It is not an easy film to watch, not the kind of film you'd want to watch after a long hard day at work, but it is a beautifully shot, fascinating film, and a unique experience for Harrison Ford fans.

Martin Teller This really isn't so bad, but it feels like a case of wasted potential. As a Herzogian journey of a self-righteous madman dragging down everyone who cares about him by his own hubris, it doesn't go quite far enough and seems watered down. It could be Weir's direction or it could be his own choices, but Ford appears to be holding back without really exploring the darkness of the character. Mirren has little to do, and Gregory is stuck in a lame caricature. The film flirts with some compelling themes but always seems to veer off into adventure mode when things start getting real. Still, the plot elements are solid and one's interest in the various situations is maintained. The music and cinematography are quite fine. I'm generally underwhelmed by Weir's post-70's work, but this is one of the better ones. It's too bad it doesn't have a little more ambition to it.