Rating of
1/4
Laughable war epic with with a lavish budget.
Indyfreak - wrote on 06/03/20
Infamous box office flop that is now reviled as one of the worst movies ever made. It's pretty bad, no question, but I've seen worse. Not to let it off the hook for its inept direction, flat performances, and terrible pacing. But I have seen worse.
Despite the cast mostly sleepwalking through it, the best actor I felt was Richard Roundtree since he's naturally charismatic. Laurence Olivier's famously hammy performance as General Douglas MacArthur is as silly as expected. His bad hairstyle, his awful makeup, and the corncob pipe look ridiculous. Ben Gazzara looks bored while Jacqueline Bisset looks lost in every other shot. There's a weird subplot about a group of reporters basically summing up what happens every fifteen minutes.
The movie reportedly cost forty-six million dollars; a staggering sum in 1982 Hollywood. There's a lot of explosions and mayhem onscreen, so the money is there. The budget was covered entirely by the Unification Church and its controversial leader Sun Myung Moon. Money well spent.
