The Osterman Weekend

If you like * bombs and bullets, you might enjoy this overwrought cold war shoot-em-up. But even after you figure out what it's all about --- no easy task --- you'll find it puerile and improbable. It reaches and the viewer retches. The James Bond movies make more sense and nobody is supposed to take Bond seriously. But they do set off a lot of explosives and fire a lot of guns when they're not performing sexual acrobatics. (Why did he want her to stop chewing gum anyhow?) It's not a dreadful movie. But almost!

Someone should have convinced director Sam Peckinpah that some editors can be a good thing for a film. THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND could have used one. It's so malformed, it's nearly incomprehensible. Peckinpah's last film is fast paced, but extremely muddled. Rutger Hauer plays a talk show host who realizes his friends are all "enemies of the state" and he's roped into to eliminating them by shadowy government operative John Hurt. Burt Lancaster is in there somewhere too, but it's not clear who he is or what he's up to. As the friends, Craig T. Nelson, Dennis Hopper and Chris Sarandon are fine but the film doesn't spend a second developing these characters. Hauer is surprisingly good in a rare non-villain role and Meg Foster and her creepy eyes are in it too!

Early '80s Cold War suspense yarn from Sam Peckinpah (his swan song, no less), and my interest in such marketing was piqued as soon as I happened upon this movie. The actual product is . . . hoo boy . . . It'a lifeless affair that feels slapped together in almost every way; incoherent script, cheap production values, even the score feels out of place. Rutger Hauer leads a cast of solid performers, all of whom are working with weak material. I don't know what else to say about this; it did nothing for me.

For the first 30 minutes or so, "The Osterman Weekend" is a talky affair that looks and sounds almost like a TV movie, which made me wonder what had happened to the famous director Sam Peckinpah. Then a GREAT car chase sequence occurs, and the old Peckinpah (complete with trademark ritualistic slow motion) is back. From that point on, the action moves inside Rutger Hauer's house, and the film turns into a claustrophobic, psychological cat-and-mouse game. In the last 15 minutes, there is an outbreak of action directed with characteristic Peckinpah flair, but there are also more plot twists than you can shake a stick at, not all of them plausible. The ultimate result is a film both compelling and muddled. One thing you can not deny is the terrific cast - if you can buy Craig T. Nelson as a martial arts master! **1/2 out of 4.