This movie borrows a chaotic car sequence from the French Connection. It trades on Elliott Gould's wry persona from M*A*S*H. It takes a very paranoid page from the Parallax View (also with Vacarro). For borrowing so much it's still worth a viewing. It's not great but it's an enormously better, more competent film than anything Brian DePalma has ever touched.
The scale and the pacing are completely botched. A Mars mission is over in twenty minutes? A wife doesn't cry over her killed astronaut hubby? etc. But the script is very funny. Karen Black's rejection of Elliott Gould is great comedy, as is David Doyle's film-script mimicry of every boss/employee scene ever filmed. There's also a helicopter chase that (though too long) will make you wonder how on earth it was filmed w/o killing 5 or 6 people. It's ugly looking for a movie that comes after the highlights of the fifties and sixties. A remake is certainly called for, with better pacing.
The scale and the pacing are completely botched. A Mars mission is over in twenty minutes? A wife doesn't cry over her killed astronaut hubby? etc. But the script is very funny. Karen Black's rejection of Elliott Gould is great comedy, as is David Doyle's film-script mimicry of every boss/employee scene ever filmed. There's also a helicopter chase that (though too long) will make you wonder how on earth it was filmed w/o killing 5 or 6 people. It's ugly looking for a movie that comes after the highlights of the fifties and sixties. A remake is certainly called for, with better pacing.