Half a really good script from William Goldman – he’s at his best with adventure tales among men, with men being wryly humorous and heroic, so this tale of Lt Patterson and the man eaters of Tsvao is a natural. Well structured and paced and all that and I’m with Goldman that the casting of Michael Douglas hurt the movie – Sean Connery, Gerard Depardieu and Morgan Freeman, who were all offered the part, would have been infinitely better. They’re all warm actors in a way Douglas didn’t – which really counted when the cold Val Kilmer was cast.
Yet his script does have a big problem – the main reason it takes them so long to kill the lions is because of mistakes by the characters: Patterson is about to shoot the lion but his gun misfires, they shift the hospital on Redbeard’s advice but the lions take out a new hospital, Patterson’s trap works but his incompetent coolies stuff up. I think it could have done with a bit more Hollywood i.e. these things were the fault of someone else, say a traitor who wanted to wreck the building of the bridge, or the money pinching boss (Beaumont, who is already the villain but doesn’t do anything really bad apart from say insensitive things). Like Beaumont refuses to give money for lion hunters (Patterson refuses them which seems silly). And it cheats by having Patterson's wife killed in a dream sequence - she should have actually visited.
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