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The Osterman Weekend (1983)
Rate:
3
Viewed:
10/19
10/19:
The Osterman Weekend is the final dated, senseless film of Sam Peckpinpah's career, and rightfully so.
I'll say the last good picture he directed was Junior Bonner. Afterwards, it's been
downhill from the painfully mediocre The Getaway to the laughably bad
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia to the completely awful
The Killer Elite to the more painfully mediocre
Cross of Iron to the ineffably confusing
The Osterman Weekend which features a plot with more holes than a pound of Swiss cheese.
Every one of them has been sophomoric that's laden with the famous slo-mo effect which becomes increasingly pointless
and over the top, failing to add anything to the overall story. Two prime examples are the action sequences in
The Osterman Weekend: the kidnapping of John Tanner's wife and son and the murder attempts by the pool area.
By name, the cast is outstanding: Rutger Hauer, John Hurt (it's Nineteen Eighty-Four
all over again for him), Craig T. Nelson (fake glued-on mustache), Dennis Hopper, Chris Sarandon (worst sex scene ever), and
Burt Lancaster (already redundant after Scorpio). How can anyone fail with them? Well, Sam
Peckinpah just did...big fucking time.
Instead of meaty roles, these guys are rendered impotent, bringing no value to the table, and are crushed by the lifeless
screenplay. The weak Big Chill-like outing is among the sad disappointments. Meg Foster
is miscast because she has the most distracting blue eyes I've ever seen on screen when Rutger Hauer's eyes will suffice.
How can the CIA killers with hundreds of hours of training in markmanship miss John Tanner and Bernard Osterman completely
when they're at the small kidney-shaped pool? It's impossible given the infinite ammo and time. Osterman is
shot multiple times in the torso but manages to survive the incident with so much a limp.
The whole surveillance setup is terrible and serves as a dead giveaway, just like Tanner's facial appearance, when it comes to
what's happening at the house. If anyone, preferably Chris Sarandon, bothered to put in a modicum of effort by looking at the
red light in the dark, he'll be prompted to say, "What the hell is that?" The camera work as shown at the end is
impossible in terms of capturing people's actions; therefore, the editing had to be done beforehand.
All in all, it was a mistake to give Sam Peckinpah one last stab at filmmaking for his "comeback" attempt through
The Osterman Weekend.