Pretty Good

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Weird, sloppy, self-indulgent, meta-physical, sometimes boring, sometimes hallucinatory: all these things describe this misfire from director Nicolas Roeg. Gene Hackman stars as a gold prospector in Alaska during the final days of the gold rush. Most of the people have given up and gone home at this point, but Hackman refuses. After a strange encounter with a meteor (I think) he receives some kind of lucky rock (I think) that gives him the extra push to find his gold strike. And does he ever. Cut to decades later, and he's fabulously wealthy, with a giant estate named Eureka. His grown daughter (Theresa Russell) has married a European playboy (Rutger Hauer) that dad doesn't approve of. There's also a shady consortium of some sort, headed by Jewish tough guy Joe Pesci (!) and represented by Italian lawyer Mickey Rourke (!), that needs Hackman's financial backing for some new endeavor.The cinematography is beautiful, as it usually is in Roeg's films, but the plot is a mess of ham-handed symbolism and uninspired dramatics. The terrific cast, which also includes Ed Lauter, Joe Spinell and Corin Redgrave, is good, with Hackman the stand-out, as usual. Rourke looks scared and uncomfortable, which fits with his character, but he comes across more like he's fully aware of how wrong he is in the role. Russell and Hauer are both beautiful, and they both spend much of the film in various states of undress. There's also one of the most brutal, protracted murder scenes I've seen in a film in a long time. It's starts off shocking, but becomes rather ludicrous the longer it's dragged out. I can't really recommend this film to anyone except Hackman fans or fans of bizarre obscurities.

This movie is an odd one, even for Roeg fans. In one sense, it's much more straight-forward, linear, and narrative than his other works. It's metaphysical attributes are also more directly stated, instead of the kaleidoscopic mix of character and occult you find in other Roeg works. On the other hand, that straightforwardness makes all of his subversive use of editing and narration even more effective, as this movie tends to cause a sense of security right before dealing a blow.The plot, as it exists in relatively straight-forward form, is about a man named Jack (played by Gene Hackman) who strikes it rich finding gold (a surreal moment made all the more effective by the water-like quality of the valuable substance). The movie then jumps forward over a decade later, where Jack's wealth and happiness on his own private island, surprise surprise, is filled with ennui and unhappiness, made all the more dramatic with his increasing selfishness, his constantly drunk wife, and his daughter's (Theresa Russell proving that her partnership with Roeg has a lot more power than mere outside-of-work relationship) romance to a womanizing French man (Rutger Hauer, in the best role I've seen him in since Blade Runner). Jack, since he's such an unlikable person AND rich, is a target to everyone else's priorities, so he gets killed. The husband of his daughter is framed, and suddenly the movie becomes a courtroom drama.The story is Roeg's most dramatic and poignant along the human level. But what seems incongruous to that aspect of the film is the Voudou, the religion, the Tarot, the Kabbalah, and all the other religious and occult symbols and dialog welded into the frame like some kind of scrapheap onto a statue. However, what all that symbolism reveals, along with the dialog (I think this is Mayerberg's best collaboration with Roeg), is the fact that this movie is neither a gold-searching adventure story, nor an idle-class ennui drama, nor a courtroom thriller... it's a meditation on life and success. But saying it like that doesn't really give credit to the type of meditation it is, for this is far from the typical art-house "let's deconstruct modern life" style meditation on an upper class it despises; it's much more a question onto the nature of what part of success is really important, and above all what part of life can actually be called life. Putting it into the context of a metaphysical/spiritual realm makes it all the more powerful, as in most cases the camera is set at a God's-eye-view. The trial is a different type of judgment than you think. The title "Eureka" isn't just about finding gold.Finally, a note about the cinematography: along with being a much more narrative work than Roeg's previous films, Eureka also is a lot less flashy. Despite that, the photography is still completely stunning, more so than ever in the lighting of the trial, which is probably one of the most reserved and subtle aspects of Roeg's film-making to date.--PolarisDiB

I loved this movie. Often surrealist wackiness doesn't do it for me, especially if blended into more straightforward narrative, but this film did it, did it well, and made it work. The first act (the wackiest) is beautiful and no matter how strange totally fitting with the rest of the movie. A lot of the previous commentors or summarizers seem to have gotten the facts of the movie a bit skewed, the McCanns live in the Bahamas during World War II, the courtroom scene (which I think worked perfectly) switches the focus not to Claude Maillot van Horn but to Jack's daughter. The murder is truly nauseating and I have a pretty decent tolerance. The story is based on a true story, the odd life and unpleasant end of Sir Harry Oakes but Roeg goes with a more personal story than anything I've ever heard about Oakes. In real life he was the victim of a dispute between HRH the Duke of Windsor, governor of the Bahamas, and the Mafia..

Roeg draws on Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes, as well as Skakespeares tempest and some Robert Service to create this tale of a man who "once had the world, now i just have the everything". a film of thems and more subplots than plot-and many themes. hackmann is a perfect Roeg actor-like Sutherland, Fox and Bowie, but some other performances are not as comfortable, or not as well written -particularly the women. A film that is worth repeated viewing