Movie Review: Papillon (1973)

WHAT A DISAPPOINTING MOVIE!

Look at the DVD case... Steve McQueen! Dustin Hoffman! A gritty '70s prison
story! On an island!!! From the director of Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner)! Oh ma Gawd! Let's get this!

The movie starts well. Beautiful, eye-popping photography. Dustin Hoffman
in Coke bottle glasses. Kick ass. Steve McQueen has a crazy plan! I am
going to love this! And then... it just sits there. McQueen struggles to
carry out the plan over and over and over and over again.

The film is based on the book by Henri Cherriririeiei, about his supposed
real-life expoits as a prisoner on French Guiana. His "daring escape" in the
book is reduced to a "stroll down the lazy river" in the movie. After 2 1/2
hours!

Today's directors all grew up watching "Mr. Belvedere," and it shows. But in the 70s, directors went to fancy film schools and were legally ordered to include one long, boring section of character development in their films. Without it, Roger Ebert automatically took away 2 stars from the review and got to eat one of your kidneys (usually the good one). Dog Day Afternoon has Chris Sarandon whining to Al Pacino. Get Carter has Michael Caine touring Birmingham for 40 minutes. And Papillon could lose about an hour of McQueen silently puttering around jail and the ocean and a tropical island and the jungle.

"Papillon" is French for butterfly, and so I am taking this DVD and submerging it in the case for Cocoon, and hopefully Wilford Brimley can metamorph this mess into something useful. Oatmeal?