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The Quiet American
(Reviewed November 7, 2002)
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Michael Caine is excellent as a lazy, adulterous British journalist in 1950s Vietnam, when the French were leaving the country and the CIA was skulking in. Brendan Fraser, on the other hand, is embarrassingly miscast as the title character, about whom there may be More Than Meets The Eye.
As always, the viewer is left thinking that anyone...ANYONE...would be better cast than Fraser in any movie in which he is supposed to play a dramatic role. He is so out of his league in scenes with Caine that I kept hoping Fraser would throw up his hands and walk off the set saying, "I'm sorry, I'm too unworthy, I'm going back to Hollywood and try to get `Dudley Do-Right 2' off the ground."
Having said that, the rest of the movie manages to be good enough to make up for Fraser's presence. The film offers a neat colonial allegory of Caine, the sophisticatedly debauched European, stringing along his trusting Vietnamese mistress until she rebels by hooking up with Fraser (who, in time-honored American fashion, will end up exploiting her trust far more cruelly than the paternal Caine ever could).
As this country prepares to charge into Iraq with the same kind of bullshit rhetoric and gung-ho rationalizations that got more than 50,000 Americans and God knows how many Vietnamese and Cambodians killed last century, it would be nice to think that somebody in charge would see this film and go, "What the hell are we thinking?"
Yeah, right. That's gonna happen.
Back Row Grade: B-
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