THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS
True story? You've gotta be lion!
Roger Ebert really stuck it to this movie when it came out, giving it his second-lowest rating, a scathing review, and a place on his "worst of 1996" list. It's a safe bet that I liked this one a little more than he did. I think I liked my last bout of motion sickness more than he liked this movie.
"Remember this", says our narrator at the outset of this film. "Even the most impossible parts of this story really happened." Putting aside for now the notion of degrees of a quality that's by definition absolute (MOST impossible?), that's quite a boast.
Val Kilmer stars as Patterson, an Irish engineer in 1896 (or 1898, I don't know) is called in to oversee the construction of a bridge in Africa. He's not just a good engineer, he's great with a rifle, too - when a pesky lion starts making chew toys out of the worker population, he sets out and takes it down, one shot. Soon, where one lion was taken down, two more take its place, referred to for some reason by the locals as the Ghost and the Darkness. As you might imagine, there ain't much more bridge-building footage in this movie. Michael Douglas shows up about 50 minutes in as Remington, a famed American hunter (no, he doesn't hunt Americans) called in to assist Patterson.
Douglas' performance is, uh, something to behold. It's not just that I've never seen him overact this much - I don't think I've seen ANYBODY overact this much that wasn't specifically in a comedy. His accent comes and goes, seeming like he's alternately trying to sound Southern and Texan, convincing with neither. He's got a wide-eyed maniac stare that just kind of inspires a weird sort of awe; when our narrator said that even the most impossible things were true, he didn't mention the impossible heights of overacting achieved by Douglas.
The lions are fairly imposing beasts, ever-hungry sharks on land who might bite you for a while just to make you scream but generally are prone to licking you to death with their cheesegrater-like tongues. The lion effects were done by Stan Winston, and I don't really know what Ebert was talking about when he mentioned that "Some of the lion attacks seem to have been staged by telling the actors to scream while a lion rug was waved in front of the camera."
It's mostly well-directed by Stephen Hopkins, a Nightmare On Elm Street grad who has directed a couple of pretty good movies and a lot of mediocre ones, who always for some reason instills in me a kernel of hope that his movies will generally be better than average. There are lots of cool shots of the African grasslands where you think you're probably seeing a lion, but it's hard to tell. He really screws up in one scene, however - one attempt on the lions' lives involving Kilmer up on a wooden platform with a baboon as bait. Bad effects, silly situations (a timely arrival of a bird knocks him right off the platform), and there's even black-and-white lion-o-vision. That's just bad, people.
William Goldman's script could've used more of a sense of humor; two hilarious lines about one guy's four wives notwithstanding. And despite it being a true story (no idea how faithful to the facts this movie really is), the repetitive scenes of people completely unable to hit anything with their rifles (for various, usually dunderheaded reasons) get kind of tiresome.
This movie features one of the few dream sequences that really fooled me - if you've seen it, you know what I mean, since it's the only one. But my brother and I, when we saw it and it reached its apex ("No way, they're NOT going to..."), we screamed. Serious - attracting annoyed glances from all across the theater, the both of us simultaneously screamed out in terror. Then, of course, we kind of shrunk into our seats and hoped nobody recognized us later.
This isn't a great movie, but it's a pretty good Jaws knockoff, and how many killer-lion movies do we get to see, anyway? It became fairly popular despite mostly middling reviews; most everyone I know who saw it loved it. It won an Oscar for sound effects, so watch it with a better sound system than my own.
One note about Canadian ratings systems. It only went nationwide in 1997, before then, each province rated on its own. But it always worked out the same - exactly the same as the American system, just different names for each category (for example, PG-13 became Mature became 14A). Most movies either stay in the same category as the MPAA rating, or one notch down - the overwhelming majority are one notch down. (an extraordinarily rare R-rated movie is given a notch-up, our R, our stigma-free NC-17, something maybe four theatrical releases have been rated since 1997 - oh, and the first two Indiana Jones movies got one notch up from PG too) The Ghost And The Darkness actually got a PG rating here - which is two notches down. And since PG is basically just a G with a P on it in either country, what you basically have is a G-rated R-rated movie. I've just always thought that was neat, and part of what makes Canada cool.