Welcome to the Jungle

I feel a little bad that we went and watched Sorcerer (1977), William Friedkin’s remake of The Wages of Fear, without having watched the original. The luck of the Netflix queue.

It starts with several vignettes:

• In Mexico, a man (Francisco Raban) enters another man’s hotel room and silently shoots him dead.
• In Jerusalem, a group of terrorists set off a bomb. Only one (Amidou) escapes capture.
• In Paris, a business man (Victor Manson) frantically tries to cover up a financial indiscretion.
• In New Jersey, a gang rob a church (with Mafia connections) and crash on getaway. Only Roy Scheider makes it out alive, and the mob is after him.

All these men wind up in a dumpy little town in Mexico, along with Karl John, who might be a Nazi hiding out. They all want to leave, but they don’t have enough money or any way to earn it. But there is an oilwell fire 200 miles away, and the only thing that will put it out is dynamite. Unfortunately, the dynamite has been improperly stored, and is “sweating” - the TNT has come out of the sticks and is pooling in the bottom of the crates. It is too unstable to be carried by helicopter. It will need to be driven.

So our cast will drive the explosives 200 miles over bad roads, take a big paycheck and go home. Actually, the maybe-Nazi gets the job, but Raban, the assassin, shoots him and takes his place. So this is not a happy team. But they build up two jungle buggies out of the best parts of trucks they can find, name them “Lazarus” and “Sorceror” and head out.

I was surprised by how long it took to get them on the road, but once they do it becomes one of the most tense and intense movies imaginable. They suffer bad roads, bandits, rotten rope bridges, and everything the jungle can throw at them. Schneider, who is kind of the protagonist, even starts to hallucinate - not a good thing, when you are driving a truck full of explosives.

This is a gritty, sweaty, rainy, tooth-gritting, nailbiter of a movie. I’m not sure if I exactly enjoyed it so much as lived through it. It is a bit slow to set the scene, showing us how these men got to Mexico. Once they get there, it has a touch of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In the jungle, it gets crazy.

I’ve got Wages of Fear in my queue now. I’ll let you know how that goes.