Journalist Rick Boyle's life in San Francisco is a mess. He's broke, married to an Italian woman with a child, and -- deserted by them -- talks a gullible disk jockey friend into driving with him in his clunker down to El Salvador. It's a jolly ride at first, a little like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Boyle is aptly played by the tic-ridden James Woods and his companion by James Belushi. They have a lot of fun driving through Mexico stoned and drunk in their convertible.
In Salvador, things take a more serious turn and end tragically. Woods' character takes us on a political tour of the grungy capitol city with its cervezarias and its whores and its dope and its thugs and its jails. We meet the American-supported right-wing dictator who blames all the unrest on the commies. The guy is running death squads, and when one of them murders an outspoken populist priest, the Army immediately arrest an innocent bystander.
There is one of those sexy, blond, camera-ready reporters who swallows every lie she's fed by the government and the CIA about the nasty rebels and the unblemished dictator. There is the American military adviser lashing out against the KGB infiltrators who will work their way up from Central America to the Rio Grande. And there is the American ambassador, Michael Murphy, a naive, well-intentioned man who turns first one way then another in his support for the brutal Hefe.
The story was co-written by Rick Boyle. He seems to know what he's talking about -- the bribes, the mindless police harassment, and the mountain of dead bodies in the official dumping ground. But it's not really much of a documentary, not if you take "documentary" to mean something like an objective portrait of a given historical moment.
Boyle's and Stone's opinions keep popping up. The dictatorship is absolutely wrong. The independent and ineffectively armed rebels are right to fight against it, but the suggestion is that, once in power, they'll become equally ruthless. In a too-long harangue, Woods tells the audience -- I mean his two companions -- that "left-wing" is not the same as "communist", but Americans keep getting them mixed up. He himself, he proclaims, is a patriot, a true American who has seen war before in Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and believes it's wrong for the US to stick its armed support and covert assistance into complicated situations that aren't understood. We can't support just ANYBODY simply because he's not a communist.
Those prejudices happen to be concordant with my own, but I rebuff sermons from any source. It would have been a better movie if Woods had kept his pie hole closed, if Stone had just SHOWN us Woods' feelings without his having to spell them out as if to a grade school class. However, maybe some viewers needed the message in bold print and, in any case, nobody ever stopped Stone from giving a lecture.
Agreeable acting, for the most part. Woods, of course, could hardly fit the role of the reckless manic better. Belushi doesn't have much of a part. That's just as well because the character is a little mushy and appears only sporadically in the second half of the film. Elpidia Carrillo may or may not be a familiar name but people are likely to recognize her face from other appearances. It was generous of the director to give us a brief nude scene. I'd never realized how saucy her bottom was. Cynthia Gibb appears as a cheerful aid or nurse from some charitable organization. She's cute as all get out. No nude scene, though, and when she is raped and murdered along with some nuns, in a scene based on a real incident, it's shocking and painful. How, one asks, is it possible for any man to rape a nun? What kind of man could rape ANY woman? The film isn't without its humorous moments. Aside from Woods and Belushi tooling along in that beat-up Mustang, there is Woods in the confessional for the first time in 33 years. He wants to marry Carrillo and, in the course of doing so, commit bigamy, and Carrillo won't go along with it unless he receives absolution and takes communion first. (It only costs him one Our Father and twelve Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition. Sin seems to be the only thing the price of which has not skyrocketed over the years.) This is one of Stone's more amateurish but less indulgent movies. There's a plot, more or less, some character development, and mostly it rings true. It would be nice if were always able to keep at least one foot in reality and if he were to stop driving everyone crazy with his directorial furbelows.
In Salvador, things take a more serious turn and end tragically. Woods' character takes us on a political tour of the grungy capitol city with its cervezarias and its whores and its dope and its thugs and its jails. We meet the American-supported right-wing dictator who blames all the unrest on the commies. The guy is running death squads, and when one of them murders an outspoken populist priest, the Army immediately arrest an innocent bystander.
There is one of those sexy, blond, camera-ready reporters who swallows every lie she's fed by the government and the CIA about the nasty rebels and the unblemished dictator. There is the American military adviser lashing out against the KGB infiltrators who will work their way up from Central America to the Rio Grande. And there is the American ambassador, Michael Murphy, a naive, well-intentioned man who turns first one way then another in his support for the brutal Hefe.
The story was co-written by Rick Boyle. He seems to know what he's talking about -- the bribes, the mindless police harassment, and the mountain of dead bodies in the official dumping ground. But it's not really much of a documentary, not if you take "documentary" to mean something like an objective portrait of a given historical moment.
Boyle's and Stone's opinions keep popping up. The dictatorship is absolutely wrong. The independent and ineffectively armed rebels are right to fight against it, but the suggestion is that, once in power, they'll become equally ruthless. In a too-long harangue, Woods tells the audience -- I mean his two companions -- that "left-wing" is not the same as "communist", but Americans keep getting them mixed up. He himself, he proclaims, is a patriot, a true American who has seen war before in Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and believes it's wrong for the US to stick its armed support and covert assistance into complicated situations that aren't understood. We can't support just ANYBODY simply because he's not a communist.
Those prejudices happen to be concordant with my own, but I rebuff sermons from any source. It would have been a better movie if Woods had kept his pie hole closed, if Stone had just SHOWN us Woods' feelings without his having to spell them out as if to a grade school class. However, maybe some viewers needed the message in bold print and, in any case, nobody ever stopped Stone from giving a lecture.
Agreeable acting, for the most part. Woods, of course, could hardly fit the role of the reckless manic better. Belushi doesn't have much of a part. That's just as well because the character is a little mushy and appears only sporadically in the second half of the film. Elpidia Carrillo may or may not be a familiar name but people are likely to recognize her face from other appearances. It was generous of the director to give us a brief nude scene. I'd never realized how saucy her bottom was. Cynthia Gibb appears as a cheerful aid or nurse from some charitable organization. She's cute as all get out. No nude scene, though, and when she is raped and murdered along with some nuns, in a scene based on a real incident, it's shocking and painful. How, one asks, is it possible for any man to rape a nun? What kind of man could rape ANY woman? The film isn't without its humorous moments. Aside from Woods and Belushi tooling along in that beat-up Mustang, there is Woods in the confessional for the first time in 33 years. He wants to marry Carrillo and, in the course of doing so, commit bigamy, and Carrillo won't go along with it unless he receives absolution and takes communion first. (It only costs him one Our Father and twelve Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition. Sin seems to be the only thing the price of which has not skyrocketed over the years.) This is one of Stone's more amateurish but less indulgent movies. There's a plot, more or less, some character development, and mostly it rings true. It would be nice if were always able to keep at least one foot in reality and if he were to stop driving everyone crazy with his directorial furbelows.