Rating of
4/4
Definitely not Simba or Mufasa!!
mdtinney - wrote on 05/23/09
Based on a true story, Kilmer is an English engineer in the early 1900's, who has six months to get a railroad trestle built across a river in Africa. After about a month, a lion starts getting bold and drags his men right out of the camp. Nothing he does either stops or impedes their advancement. By the time he tells his boss why he is so far behind schedule a total of forty men have disappeared.
Enter Douglas, a rough neck American who is known widely for his hunting skills. Kilmer, himself, fancies himself a hunter, (in fact, he killed a lion earlier in the movie with just one shot) but I got the impression right from the first time that they met that Kilmer knew what Douglas was all about and let him call all the shots.
The one thing I did not understand was why Douglas got top billing in this film. He did not enter the picture for almost the first hour of it and then, the story still seemed to focus on Kilmer's character and his problems.
As far as theatrical value goes, this is an excellent movie! The characters meshed with each other in a way that kept you in the story. And even though you might not have understood why things were done the way they were, the plot seemed, somehow, to find a way to explain it to the viewer. It took a while for me to get over Kilmer with an English accent, but, once I got past that (in the first ten minutes, or so), I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. And it comes in at #26 on my Top Movie list!
