Deliverance (1972)

Deliverance is an excellent outdoor thriller about survival directed by John Boorman, of which is one of my favorite of his work (along with Excalibur). This film has a great ensemble cast of fantastic actors that includes Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox. The film has these dudes going on a canoeing/camping trip in the soon to extinct Cahulawassee River, intact before it gets expanded and turns into a lake. However, these "city boys" did not make a good impression with the locals, in which provokes an unpleasant confrontation between our main characters and backwoods hillbillies. One of which is played by Bill Mc Kinney who is an excellent villan and also will go on to play as Captain "Red legs" in one of my favorite westerns The Outlaw Josey Wales. The outdoor locations are photographed beautifully and the film is tense, violent and handled in a very realistic and gritty manner. Acting performances are second to none, Burt Reynolds in paticular was awesome. He is criminally underated as a actor, as much as I like Smokey And The Bandit, he should have made less movies like that and more movies like Deliverance. Anyways, Deliverance is an excellent film, that all the way around is very engrossing as a story and very powerful and well made.

....I was advised not to shout so i must just start by saying this film was particularly awful because it really has no meaning, and the characters are just wafty and weak. I mean, the river was nice to look at but i was expecting to watch an actual film. That really was the absolute highlight. The rape seen was good because it was freaky and i did sit up a bit and stop eating my crisps. Spoiler - Four men in a river.

At the risk of triggering the possible removal of my own reviews, which are far from perfect, I wish the editors of IMDb would be more selective about the "user reviews" that they pass for publication here. More selectivity would upgrade the website immensely, especially the elimination of the nonsense that sometimes accompanies films that have achieved commercial success. While most of the user reviews here are seriously written and therefore worthwhile, even when I don't agree with them, a minority of writers, many of whom can't even properly put two full, English sentences together, ruin it for everyone, as has become all too common on the Internet in general. There. I finally got that off my chest.The much discussed confrontation between the local mountain men and the characters of Ed (John Voight) and Bobby (Ned Beatty) was not merely placed in the original book for gratuitous or sensationalist purposes. Although it is a very graphic and disturbing scene, it exists to illustrate one of the book's most important themes. While the group of adventurers seeks "deliverance" from what might be overly restrictive and even oppressive rules and conventions of modern civilization, they are totally unprepared for the absence of such restrictions in a world that they obviously do not know. Instead of being liberated from the confining norms of urban existence, they suddenly find themselves as endangered victims of a world where such social rules and regulations no longer exist. To me, there are some similarities of the "horror" the men find here to the theme of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", which was adapted to the screen as "Apocalypse Now".Similarly, the writer does not exploit physical deformities for purely sensationalist purposes. These are conditions that are plainly visible in the rural world of the remote mountains rather than being kept hidden as they are in the "civilized", middle class world to which the urban adventurers are accustomed. The disfigured locals therefore serve as a forewarning to the visitors that the world they are about to enter is one that is very different from the one that they know. Accordingly, they need to apply, with much humility, the caution that they never exercise before it is too late for them. This film beautifully captures not only the natural sights of the river but the sounds as well. In general, I thought that the direction by John Boorman and the performances were excellent, including those of the lesser known actors who play the two menacing mountain men, Bill McKinney and Herbert "Cowboy" Coward. I am very impressed by the fact that the four leads risked doing their own stunts, including the swift water sequences. Accolades especially go to John Voight for scaling the gorge and to Burt Reynolds for quickly learning how to use a bow and arrow on short notice.My only problem was with the often hokey and hackneyed dialogue, especially at the beginning, but that seems minor in comparison to the highly suspenseful and thought provoking action that follows.

I first saw Deliverance when it was in the theaters what seems like a million years ago. Burt Reynolds became a big start and Jon Voight received another big boost in his career thanks to the film. The only real problem I had with the movie was when I stopped and thought about the general plot line afterwards. It isn't exactly airtight.The boys killed a mountain man, justifiably. One of two mountain men roaming the woods together. The other ran off. They decided to bury the corpse and forever after remain mum about it. Then Drew, played by Ronny Cox, was killed though no one knows whether the death came at the hand of the river, or a gunshot presumably by the second mountain man. Injuries were inconclusive on the dead body. The fear was that it was a gunshot by the second mountain man stationed high on the cliffs overhead. Voight ends up climbing the cliff, finding the mountain man and killing him. As far as anyone knows, the second mountain man, now dead and hidden at the bottom of the river, never disclosed the fate of the first mountain man. Yet the boys felt compelled to make-up a story even though there was no evidence connecting them to anything. But probably more odd was the local sheriff suspected the boys of wrongdoing without any evidence suggesting they even saw the mountain men. It would seem more plausible that the sheriff would have taken a report on the death of Drew and then asked the three remaining boys if during their travels they had happened to see the two mountain men. "No, can't say that we did," would have been a reply and that would have been that. I guess that would make for a short, boring movie.