Review: Eureka


From Nicolas Roeg, the director of such confounding and pretentious works as “Bad Timing…A Sensual Obsession” (and admittedly good films like “Don’t Look Now” and “Walkabout”) comes yet another film in this vein, but for once he takes a fine cast down with him. 1981 flick starts as a “Citizen Kane” tale of gold miner Gene Hackman becoming extremely rich, but paranoid of his beloved daughter Theresa Russell’s handsome suitor (played by a pre-“Blade Runner” Rutger Hauer). Then it turns into a mob film, with scene-stealing Joe Pesci (commanding despite his small stature) and a young-looking Mickey Rourke turning up as a Capone-like mobster and his trusted accountant/henchman, respectively. Add to this a courtroom finale and touches of voodoo and kinky sex, and you’ve got a film heading in every which way, and never working at any point.

 

The acting is somewhat uneven as well; a soft-spoken Hauer is well-cast as the handsome but possibly opportunistic playboy, whilst Pesci, Ed Lauter (in a fine turn as Hackman’s pal and long-suffering employee), and a surprisingly effective Rourke probably fair the best. Hackman is surprisingly flat, he has a fixed brooding and introspective facial expression that never changes. Even worse is the seriously overrated Russell (AKA Mrs. Roeg), in a supremely silly performance that never for a moment convinces. It is at the courtroom climax that things really go to hell, at first the film is just interminable, but here it becomes extraordinarily stupid, with Russell (and admittedly Hauer) making histrionic speech after speech with absolutely no interruptions from lawyers or even the judge! It’s the most laughable courtroom scene I’ve seen since Fredric March devoured the scenery in “Inherit the Wind”.

 

A few nice grisly moments, but otherwise silly, slow, uber-pretentious, confusing (I’m still not sure what the final scene between Hauer and Russell was meant to suggest), and overlong. For arthouse lovers, perhaps, but even they’ll be roaring with laughter at the finale. The screenplay is by Paul Mayersberg (Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth”).

 

Rating: D+

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