John Boorman's career is littered with misfires, maybe the price we pay for the huge artistic risks he takes. In between the early triumphs of Point Blank (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968) and his masterwork Deliverance (1972) lies Leo the Last, which gets very little love and not even the kind of scornful attention accorded to catastrophes like Zardoz (1974) and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).
Maybe this is because bad drama has kitsch value, whereas bad comedy nobody can stand, and Leo the Last appears, at times, to be attempting humor, a surprising choice for Boorman whose very humorlessness can seem a strength in his successful films and a weakness in his failures. There's something heroic about the fact that it apparently never occurred to Boorman that a man having sex wearing full plate armor (Excalibur), Sean Connery in thigh boots, bandoliers and nappy (Zardoz) and Linda Blair doing a musical...
Maybe this is because bad drama has kitsch value, whereas bad comedy nobody can stand, and Leo the Last appears, at times, to be attempting humor, a surprising choice for Boorman whose very humorlessness can seem a strength in his successful films and a weakness in his failures. There's something heroic about the fact that it apparently never occurred to Boorman that a man having sex wearing full plate armor (Excalibur), Sean Connery in thigh boots, bandoliers and nappy (Zardoz) and Linda Blair doing a musical...
- 11/20/2014
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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