The production team had a very powerful true story to build upon, but they just tacked Bronson and Marvin in a loose adaptation and felt content with it. In the end, the biggest flaw of all is there's hardly a Death Hunt taking place. The whole picture fumbles with geographical continuity so much that suspense is never gaining momentum. Aerial shots of abrupt snowy slopes contrast with the ground shots where actors happen to run on a mostly flat soil, with little snow most of the time.
Thus the chase looks more like a veteran's trekking in the mountains. Peter Hunt was supposed to be an innovative editor, but he constantly failed to prove he could edit pictures in his head to achieve remarkable results as a director. All the chase sequences feel disjointed, shot at various locations. Bronson is in sight, then he escapes, and then again he seems cornered by the Mountie posse soon joined by the improvised bounty hunters coming out of the wild, simply catching up with the unrelenting chase (ok Bronson is supposed to zigzag and the plane helps to locate him very closely, but little is done to make this a consistent narrative feature).
Eventually it's a poor rendition of a fantastic true story only because the guys involved took the pedestrian path to a Death Hunt in the Arctic wilderness. The R-rated bullet impacts or the wasteful Angie Dickinson cameo are further evidence of a cheap-shots-oriented production.
Thus the chase looks more like a veteran's trekking in the mountains. Peter Hunt was supposed to be an innovative editor, but he constantly failed to prove he could edit pictures in his head to achieve remarkable results as a director. All the chase sequences feel disjointed, shot at various locations. Bronson is in sight, then he escapes, and then again he seems cornered by the Mountie posse soon joined by the improvised bounty hunters coming out of the wild, simply catching up with the unrelenting chase (ok Bronson is supposed to zigzag and the plane helps to locate him very closely, but little is done to make this a consistent narrative feature).
Eventually it's a poor rendition of a fantastic true story only because the guys involved took the pedestrian path to a Death Hunt in the Arctic wilderness. The R-rated bullet impacts or the wasteful Angie Dickinson cameo are further evidence of a cheap-shots-oriented production.