Writing a two star review for a film that has an IMDb rating of 7.1 must look like spite, but let me make my case. Firstly, the plot line is confusing, quickly ticking off events from the book, without the viewer getting to understand their full significance. So we do not get to understand Billy's love of the Sigourney Weaver character, his bitterness as someone who has not had love reciprocated and thus his spiral out of control. We do not really get to understand Mel Gibson's motivation as a journalist either, only his romance with Sigourney Weaver. So, we do not really understand why he deliberately loses the swimming race with the British military attaché - (this was done to befriend him and get more scoops). This messes with the dramatic impact, meaning that we not only do not get to know the characters, nor the complexity of the political backdrop of Indonesia under a dictatorship with communist revolutionaries and Muslim generals. My second problem is with the casting. Mel Gibson and Siguourney Weaver are the fabulous looking Hollywood stars brought into attract an audience, but Gibson is wooden and wholly unbelievable as a foreign journalist. He overuses a cigarette as a prop as if that is the main characteristic of a journalist. He only comes alive when offended and given a chance for violence, (which explains his future casting in Braveheart/Lethal Weapon). Weaver gives a reasonable English accent, but the role calls for someone with a cut glass voice to emphasise how foreign her posting in Jakarta is. Similarly Linda Hunt does well as Billy Kwan, but why bother? With a billion Chinese on this earth why opt for a white female to play a male half-Chinese man?
Review of The Year of Living Dangerously
