Review: Deliverance


Four men from the city (Atlanta to be exact) get in over their heads on a weekend canoe trip into backwoods territory when confronted by two single-minded creeps; toothless Coward and, intimidating and repugnant McKinney (the latter would go on to a respectable career in B movies and the occasional Clint Eastwood film. The former, however, would not). Reynolds is the brawny, uber-macho survivalist nut (still a suburbanite, though), Beatty is the somewhat irritable and irritating chubby one (you can call him Piggy, though), Cox the sensitive pacifist (perhaps the moral compass, but is such a thing plausible in Hicksville, USA? Not my criticism, but probably one of the film’s), and Voight is the somewhat quite and unsure one (you can call him Deer in Headlights).

 

Unusual, interesting (if supremely overrated), well-shot 1972 John Boorman (the even more overrated dark fantasy “Excalibur”) film is pretty well-done on all fronts (even Reynolds is good in this, in easily the best film of his career), but personally I think it would’ve been better had Reynolds switched places with Beatty for one ‘key’ scene (anyone who has seen the film knows exactly what scene I mean), to better drive home the film’s points about challenging the notion of masculinity.

 

Furthermore…I can’t say I have any great desire to see this film again (it’s a lot better than the somewhat similar “Straw Dogs”, though), after having endured the rather unsavoury goings on twice now. That’s enough for me, I’m afraid, and it does drag on a bit at the end, too. Love the ‘Duelling Banjos’ scene of course, and some of the action scenes on the water rapids are top-notch for that sort of thing. The screenplay is by novelist James Dickey (who appears at the end of the film as a sheriff), and the rugged scenery is wonderfully captured by Vilmos Zsigmond (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, “The Deer Hunter”), one of the film’s chief assets.

 
Rating: B-

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