Just perfect...

Good start, but then it gets ruined

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

A lot of animals suffered during the process of making this movie. You can watch them being dragged, chained and detained. I couldn't watched it longer after 50 minutes and was optimistic to be well entertained at the beginning. Some people reviewed it as a family movie. Sure - if you like going with your children in to the zoo and watching mentally burned animals walking up and down or if you having pig for Christmas dinner after you watched Babe then go for it. But if you really love animals spare yourself watching it.

John Wayne set against an azure African sky, with the gentle thrum of Henry Mancini's score for accompaniment in search of wild animals to capture in the veldt. What else do you need?Not much, if you are director Henry Hawks. Which is what you get in this picturesque travelogue entertainment.Wayne is Sean Mercer, whose business is collecting dangerous Tanzanian wildlife for zoos. Already behind schedule, he is thrown for a loop when a Swiss zoo which buys many of his animals sends a beautiful photographer, Anna Maria D'Alessandro, a. k. a. "Dallas" (Elsa Martinelli), to tag along."Rhino, elephants, buffalo, and a greenhorn," huffs Sean.As other reviewers here rightly note, "Hatari!" is another in the Hawks mold featuring a group of adventure-ready characters coming together to handle adversity. Truth is, there's not much adversity here. Of course, the animal-catching is dangerous, something established right at the start when we see Sean's deputy Little Wolf (Bruce Cabot) get his leg gored by an angry rhino. But for the most part, this is a light entertainment with little story to interfere with the ambiance.Wayne is in his Grand Old Man mode here, leading a game supporting cast that includes Hardy Krüger and Red Buttons, who amiably vie for the attentions of young Brandy (Michèle Girardon), the daughter of Sean's former boss.Wayne gets off some choice one-liners. When a Frenchman nicknamed Chips (Gérard Blain) and Krüger's character come to blows, Sean tries to settle things peacefully. "You can't whip us all," he tells Chips."I can try!" Chips replies."Well, bring your lunch!"Not sure what that means, but it is a fun scene. There are many fun scenes in "Hatari!" In fact, the whole film is a collection of fun scenes cobbled together with long interludes of Mancini music, wisecracks, smoking, and drinking. I wouldn't recommend this 150-minute- plus film to just anyone, even with the very real-looking capture scenes to keep your attention. It just ambles along in its unhurried way, as if Hawks thought "Rio Bravo" was too quick breaking up the chatter with shoot-outs. Wayne only once fires a weapon, and that is to warn off a mother elephant who gets too close to Dallas and three orphan elephant calves who have adopted her.The cinematography by Russell Harlan got a deserved Oscar nomination; he was earning his keep even when Leigh Brackett's script devolves into an inane soap opera in the bush. Will Buttons' annoying Pockets character catch Brandy, or 500 monkeys in a tree? Will he know what to do with either if he does? The film doesn't seem to, and throws everything up in the air at the end with a merry chase involving a suddenly despondent Dallas that will please the ten-year-olds who like shots of elephants running through a hotel lobby.But since I am a Wayne fan, and enjoy beautiful scenery and entrancing music, I'm not much for complaining. Just a warning that this is more a jaunt than anything meaty, and that both patience and a fast-forward button may well come in handy.

. . . because most of the African animals shown in this flick have been slaughtered to extinction by ISIS terrorists since HATARI! was shot in the 1900s, just like the JURASSIC WORLD dinosaurs. And it's small wonder that these critters even made it to the 1970s, as you watch HATARI!'s "MAD MAX"-like convoys of leaded gasoline guzzling jeeps running amok all over the countryside, crashing into this species and that. Obviously, most of the animals being kidnapped by John Wayne's pirate outfit are destined for the "bush meat" market. Wayne's procurer-in-chief character--"Sean Mercer"--all but admits this, when he notes that the 500 Vervet Monkeys his crew of White Europeans has just rounded up will yield only $6,000 in aggregate--the price of meat, NOT zoo exhibits! Speaking of bush meat, Wayne is not very interested in the chick throwing herself at him here (zoo photographer "Dallas") until she's converted into a low-maintenance lover, through FGM--courtesy of the "Warusha" tribe which forcibly "adopts" her. (Though this scene, 98 minutes into HATARI!, is not presented as graphically as similar material in this year's GREEN INFERNO, Sean's reaction to Dallas' "modifications" proves her FGM is more finalized than that of INFERNO.) If this is somewhat of a HATARI! low-light, getting to hear Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk" tune in two variations is the main highlight here.

'Hatari!', which means 'danger' in Swahili, is one of Howard Hawks' most delightful late period films. The story centers around a group of men (and 1 strong woman) who capture wild animals in Africa and then sell them to zoos. Trouble starts for the group when a beautiful photographer, played by Elsa Martinelli, comes to the camp to capture them at work. She's not ready for the toughness of the job the team does and soon realizes she'll have to adjust her decidedly metropolitan ways to be successful.As in many of Hawks' pictures, the main characters are professionals and are good at what they do. The friction with the photographer stems primarily from her not being a fellow pro at capturing these animals and thus the threat she poses to the group's solidarity and, perhaps, safety. Hawks plays much of the picture for laughs (the milking goat scene with Red Buttons had me howling), but he gives us a great sense of adventure and danger in the spectacular sequences where they chase down rhinos and giraffes and other animals and attempt to capture them. The cinematography in these sequences is nothing short of astonishing and must've been incredibly difficult to capture on film. The characters are richly written by the great Leigh Brackett and the inevitable romance that ensues between Elsa Martinelli and John Wayne is nicely written and, at times, very funny.All in all, this is a classic Hawks' film. It has a bit of everything a fan of Hawks will like: a group of professionals working together, lack of a 'plot', strong willed women, great comedy, fine cinematography, and witty dialogue. It's rather long at 157 minutes for probably some tastes, but I was never once bored during this lovely gem.