This movie has the most realistic feel of any movie I’ve seen in quite some time:
A bunch of folks struggling to overcome thoughts of greed when a fabulous treasure map comes into their hands.
How would YOU behave?
There are no death defying heroics, just regular folks stranded on a remote island pulling together — not just to get the treasure, but to survive — and not to survive each for himself, but to survive all for one and one for all.
How this made it past the narco-narcissistic censors in Hollywood is beyond me, but I’m glad it did.
This film has it all. Older dudes with pattern baldness in title roles. Cell phone reception on a remote island that actually cuts out when a lightning storm hits. Clothes that dry out quickly after a drenching in a hurricane without everybody stripping down to their birthday suits.
Bad guys motivated solely by money is a little hard to swallow, though. Hey, this is Panama, ground zero for the drug trade. Nor is the fate of the world at stake.
How can anybody get excited about a chest full of gold glam? We see that much bullion on our fav starlets all the time.
No slick actors here, just real live people who speak like your next door neighbors. A bickering married couple with genuine issues and quaint Afro-American attitude. A pretty girl without excess arrogance.
Nicolette Sheridan and Stephen Baldwin are two nice people happy to be together, working on a relationship like guys and girls do when they’re stranded, alone, afraid, and attracted to one another.
The odd man out, Stephen’s brother, isn’t a gay pervert know-it-all who interjects himself in the middle of any sign of blossoming love but, well — a loyal brother, who steps respectfully away to take a back seat to his big brother.
B movies like this have all the reality so lacking in the highly polished A listers. There is time for dramatic landscapes, bald spots, weather, lightning, and storm clouds.
This film even has a real, live aircraft carrier, with an actual bridge and a bona fide Combat Information Center — real Marine choppers taking off the carrier deck. Oorrah. Semper Fi, dude.
If this movie (released in 2003) was made now, the FX would take up ten times more screen time, the bad guys would all be shiny bald, one of the good guys would be gay (the smart, clever one — maybe even a switch hitter who hits on the pretty lady in one scene and her handsome beau in the next), the dame would be hard and bitter instead of warm, cozy, and likable; the black couple would rant about racial issues endlessly like uppity Obama clones, the Marine rescue mission would actually arrive to save the day, the romance would end with a shaking of hands instead of a wet, lingering french kiss; the pirate gold would be worth a gazillion dollars instead of — well, what it was — vastly overshadowing any other possible treasures earned, by all of the parties involved.
In short, it would be a narcissistic extravaganza of bare bodies, raw emotions, and constant sexual subtext — instead of a couple of real breasts in a wet t-shirt looking for true love instead of silicone lust.
You put one gay in any cast and you drive all the other cast members to extremes of characterization that are not even as realistic as all those “pro wrestling” scripted reality TV shows. Society at large is the same way.
As the gay rights warriors gain influence, every other segment of society trends to the extreme until you have what we see now — radical fundamentalists of every stripe at each other’s throats.
It’s a pity gays aren’t still in the closet where they belong, quietly living their quiet lives like all the rest of us do, carrying their cross (we all have our crosses) instead of burning their Calvary in defiance of all things civilized.
The Visigoth hordes who overwhelmed the Pax Romana would be proud of the radical extremist gays, but nobody else — not now, not then, not at any time in the future.
Society is made to work best as a slow, casual, easy going B movie.
