Nonureva Really Surprised!

Peereddi I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

leplatypus I'm always interested in movies which tell the adventures of people who leaves their usual life to follow their heart (as I would five everything to do the same...). So I couldn't miss this one and if it has a big lump in the middle, it' still a great one. Tagged forever with blockbusters, Harrison is unfairly not rated as a true actor and it's a pity as here, he is just amazing: Usually quiet, he is rather expansive now, so driven by his dreams and convictions! We have never seen him like this before and he is great! He manages so well the character that you can notice that since the beginning, he is on the edge so his later fall is expected! The story is thus interesting as for one time, one man and his family fulfills his dream and lose everything due to hazard! Beyond the personal story, it's also a strong ecological tale and an intelligent reflexion about civilization and religions. It's funny to see that the catholic evangelist is pretty authoritative and intransigent when he should be all love and compassion. On the other hand, Harrisson is also on the wrong path in my opinion: reject modernity and civilization and living like the first man may seem positive but in the end, it's mixing a mean with an end. Which goal Harrison wanted with his family unhappy? This kind of idea just forget the incredible creative human mind and technology is first build to help and protect mankind! Finally, I would say that Weir was one of the best director in the 80s: « witness », « mosquito », « green card », « dead poets » and i wonder what happened to him as i don't heard about him anymore !

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.

gonzomysanity This American movie is ridiculous, not to mention highly politically incorrect and borderline offensive. The family move from picket-fence America to La Mosquita, Honduras; the country not being mentioned at all in the film. The director has chosen to present the view that the people of Central are almost entirely Garifuna - with quite strangely Jamaican accents. The reality is that the population of Mayan people outnumber the Garifuna by far, especially inland. The fact that the movie was filmed in Belize which has a different kind of landscape adds to the director's fantasy of a 'wild jungle territory' without portraying any accuracy. Also, everyone seems to speak English, with an American accent.Harrison Ford's character plays an egotistical American man who doesn't seem to bat an eyelid at the startling white supremacy subtly normalised in the film. The family quickly buy up a small town and set the natives to work for them. True, Ford does work alongside the indigenous peoples but noticeably not as hard and seems to boss everyone around an awful lot. The son played by River Phoenix quotes: "He called this notch in the jungle a 'superior civilisation' just as America might have been."The children make this film bearable as they play together and develop some morals and integrity. The beautiful Belizean landscape also makes for an interesting watch. Ultimately, a typical example of how some people think they are superior to others, normalise it and not even notice they are doing it.

Rockwell_Cronenberg The Mosquito Coast was the second collaboration between Harrison Ford and Peter Weir, coming directly on the heels of their first, the superb Witness. Like his work with Mel Gibson at the beginning of the decade, Weir's teaming up with Ford allowed the director to find a muse who would not only be able to accurately portray the complex themes and emotions of the character, but also give the actor a rare chance to demonstrate his true worth as a versatile performer.Harrison Ford, as the eccentric inventor Allie Fox, is given full control here and takes on a character that no one would ever expect to see him in, or would ever really expect to see him in again. He has played the guy who is fed up before, but Allie Fox is fed up to the point of insanity. He's had it with America and in an ongoing series of Howard Beale-esque diatribes on the state of his once great country, he decides to pick up his family and move them all to the jungle, to experience life at it's most basic. At first it's a dream come true, but soon the Fox family finds that it's not America that's lost it's way, it is the whole of society and you'll encounter it wherever you go.The Mosquito Coast is more about it's themes than anything else, taking on serious explorations of the American family, the loss of innocence in a father/son relationship where the son must become a man and stand up to his father and many facets of religion and it's place in the family and society. I felt like the mother's unwillingness to stand up to Allie was a little unbelievable as his descent into madness progressed, but it was a necessary artificiality in order to bring the character study full circle and turn Allie into the kind of menace that he was constantly accusing America of being. He brings his family down much in the way that he claims America is bringing everyone else down, and it's a powerful dissection of this deeply flawed and arrogant man.Ford delivers what could well be the finest work of his career, stripping away all of his immense charm and taking on a deeply unlikeable character. This is a man who could have easily been torture to have to sit with for two hours, but Ford's charisma and always engaging screen presence is able to make him a fascinating man to study. River Phoenix does fine work as the eldest son of the family, as does Helen Mirren as the mother.Weir's absorbing direction takes a bit of a backseat here, settling for a more conventional tone and instead allowing the story and the character to take over the picture, which is a bold and appropriate move for him to make. It speaks to his intelligence as a director that he knows when to step back and let the other elements take the front seat, although there are still a few magnificently staged sequences that stand strong in Weir's roster of them.