But are they just playing poor Rutger as a pawn in a much murkier game of international chess???? Who cares. I'm hard-pressed to think of a film more irrelevant to watch nowadays. Robert Ludlum is hardly a commanding name these days. You might as well watch a movie based on something by Erma Bombeck. Tough-guy director Sam Peckinpah's last film is a boring, bitter, unrewarding flick standing awkwardly on 80s terrain, between the dark psychological intrigue of 70s thrillers like Coppola's The Conversation and Lumet's Network and the slicker 90s stuff like The Firm. Peckinpah seems absolutely at a loss as to what needed to happen in '83 cinema to deliver a real gut-punch, so Osterman moves creakily along from one misguided set-piece to another. The car chases are stilted; the sex scenes are just embarrassing. In between, there's some nice interplay between the leads, along with fine performances from John Hurt, Burt Lancaster (as a Reagan-esque conservative government fuck), and Meg Foster (as Hauer's wife). Plus, it's hard to be too mad at a film whose climax involves crossbows. But it doesn't add up to much. By the end, the film's heavy-handed message is beaten over your head: it's a parable about the perils of losing your freedom by watching too much TV. Which would be fine and good, had I not just lost another 100 minutes of freedom watching The Osterman Weekend.
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