Sorcerer

1977 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: See The Wages of Fear. I mean, see the plot of The Wages of Fear.

The Wages of Fear is the superior telling of this mothertruckin' thriller, but this William Friedkin movie delivers the goods. It just takes a really long time to get going. We begin with four vignettes that give some background on the four characters who will eventually be hauling dangerous explosions through troublesome terrain in a pair of dilapidated trucks. One's a hitman, one's a guy who owes people money, one's a terrorist, and one's that guy who was in Jaws. It's an interesting approach to these characters, but if I didn't know what this story was or where they'd end up, it probably would have been fairly confusing. Eventually, they end up in the same location, a kind of dirty purgatory, and things pick up. Well, they don't exactly pick up. The characters are just kind of sitting around, stuck in a decrepit village, hopeless and sweaty and very likely contemplating the life decisions that pushed them into this little armpit of the world. For a cinephile like me--one easily amused by chickens or watching characters lusting over Coca Cola--it qualifies as picking up, however. Kudos to the location scouts who found this place and these extras and those chickens, and the cinematographers really know how to shoot these characters to capture their tough-guy hopelessness and the surrounding details that form a kind of wreath around that hopelessness.

They don't get in their trucks until after an hour of the movie has passed, and from that point on, this is as good as slow-motion action gets. You could have told me exactly what the fate of all four characters was before their journey began, and the way Friedkin tells their story still would have managed to be suspenseful. In fact, since I figured this ended pretty much the way The Wages of Fear ended, I felt like I already knew what was going to happen to the characters, but that didn't stop the tension from building each time the cameras shot these truck tires on a precipice or during a bridge scene. That bridge scene just seems impossible, both in the movie's reality with the characters trying to pull off something they doesn't seem possible and in the making of the scene.

Nothing paints a better picture of despair than Roy Scheider staring at the posterior of a lady on a Coca Cola advertisement.