| The Eiger Sanction | | Cast : | Clint Eastwood, George Kennedy | | Director : | Clint Eastwood | | Studio : | Universal Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | May 21, 1975 | | DVD Released Date : | March 04, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | June 06, 2005 | | Summary | Wierd. Sadistic. Entertaining. Eastwood! | Content
 | In his seemingly endless career, Clint Eastwood has directed quite a few movies, and acted in a helluva lot more. "The Eiger Sanction" may rank as the wierdest of all of these, and that's saying something. It's the not-so-short story of a semi-retired government assassin who is blackmailed back into service for one last job. Of course, "one last job" turns into several. And the last of the last involves a target whose identity is unknown to both Eastwood and his employers. Cross a boilerplate international secret-agent yarn with a whodunnit, or rather a whoisit, mix in some Rocky-esque training sequences and top it off with a documentary on the wierd because-it's-there mountain-climbing culture, and you have "The Eiger Sanction."
I knew after 5 minutes of watching this movie it had to be based on a novel, and not a particularly good one at that. It has the feeling of a by-the-numbers story punched up to "colorful" dimensions by a pill-popping hack writer, who deciced that making every character so wildly eccentric would make us forget they could all have walked right out of Central Casting with their per diem checks in hand.
Take the names, for instance: Hemlock, Mello, Dragon, Wormwood, Pope, George (for a woman), and of course, Jemimah. Subtle, they're not.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Eastwood is Dr. Hemlock, the ex-assassin who now works as college professor. For a third of the film, Clint plays Hemlock as a fussy, smug, condescending, know-it-all who uses words like "involuted" and wears ridiculous 70's era eyeglasses. Then, about a half-hour into the film, he simply becomes CLINT EASTWOOD, guzzling beer, using words like "ain't" and abandoning the professor persona completely. I never did figure out whether this was intentional, meaning that Hemlock's collegiate personality was simply an act, or whether Clint simply couldn't summon the energy to play Hemlock as such an annoying, arse-puckered temple of repression and decided to play himself for the rest of the flick instead. To his credit, once Eastwood drops the smug, his character is a lot more likable and often very funny.
Hemlock's boss is Dragon, a wierd albino who lives in a climate-controlled office(I'm not making this up). Dragon, we are told, used to work for the Nazis, and how he heads up C-2, a "deniable" gov't agency that "sanctions" various unfortunates who fall afoul of it. He blackmails Hemlock out of retirement by threatening problems with the IRS over Hemlock's art collection (I SWEAR I am not making this up). Then he sweetens the pot by saying that the mystery target is the guy that iced Hemlock's friend and mentor. Dragon also employs a hapless minion named Pope, whose main purpose in the film seems to be to get beaten up and humiliated by Eastwood. Question: if you're such a Professor Moriartyesque mastermind, why can't you employ a goon who actually knows how to fight?
Hemlock's girlfriend, sort of, is a black female agent named....sigh....Jemimah. She seduces him and steals his money, which is how all good relationships start. Then he gives her a condescending lecture on the immortality of her actions, which had me holding my head in dismay. Dude, YOU KILL PEOPLE FOR A LIVING, AND YOU'RE GIVING MORALITY LESSONS? NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL INVOLUTED.
After killing several unimportant people, Hemlock discovers that his mystery target is a mountain-climber going up with an expedition to best the Eiger, a man-eating pile o'rock in the Swiss Alps. Since Hemlock twice failed to conquer the Eiger, he's naturally intrigued. He can combine his two hobbies and take a vacation to Europe all at once. But first he has to get in shape, and since this takes half the movie, it's worth noting.
Eastwood's old friend George Kennedy trains him at his remote desert resort in Arizona. While Hemlock follows George, his female Indian mountain guide, around on endless runs up sheer rock, he runs into Mello, an effete, foppish ex-mercenary now emeshed in the drug trade, who left Hemlock for dead in the jungle years ago. Poor Mello, played by Jack Cassidy, is one of those unfortunate characters who always appear in Eastwood films, whose express purpose is to be humiliated over and over again and then get killed. Like Dragon, Mello employs a bodyguard who can't fight and ends up blubbering for his life in the middle of the desert. The scene is played for laughs, but I didn't find it funny, or realistic. Hemlock drives the guy at gunpoint into the Mojave desert and leaves him to die of thirst and heat stroke? You gotta be kidding. First of all, if Mello really was an ex-special forces drug kingpin, he'd hardly be the floppy-wristed wuss Cassidy is forced to portray. Second, he'd be carrying a damn gun himself, instead of a poodle and a pack of cigarettes. I've met a lot of SF guys in my life, and none of 'em ever lisped, "You let ME choose the wine!"
Having prepped himself, Eastwood heads for the Eiger while trying to puzzle out which of his team-mates he's got to kill. He also beats up Pope again, for using an unpleasant phrase to describe Jemimah. Once again, let us behold the hypocrisy: the murderer for hire stands up for racial justice. Finally, and by this time you've worn quite a groove in your couch and are probably on like your ninth beer, they climb the mountain, and the real fun begins. Will Eastwood get his man? Will Eastwood even survive the climb? Do you care, considering he's playing a sadistic button-man with a superiority complex?
The answer is, yeah, sort of. This movie is bizarre, sluggish, wantonly cruel, and has enough shots of the Arizona desert and the Swiss alps to fill 2 or 3 documentaries. But it's also wierdly compelling and visually impressive. When he isn't humiliating people or killing them, Eastwood's Hemlock is wisecracking at thrice the rate of Dirty Harry. All that's missing is the enjoyabl sensation that the hero is actually doing something good. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 21, 2005 | | Summary | MOUNTAIN CLIMBING FOR DUMMIES | Content
| THE EIGER SANCTION is definitely not a film that would have foreshadowed the great films Clint Eastwood would achieve later in his career. If it weren't for the mountain climbing scenes, this movie is rather lifeless and dull. Clint plays a college art professor (duh?) who was once a top notch assassin, and he is blackmailed into doing two sanctions for the albino head of some covert agency (played by the late Thayer David, who I will remember from his roles on TV's Dark Shadows). His sanction is the Eiger Sanction, his job to kill one assassin who got away; the problem is he doesn't know who the assassin is. Along for the ride are Vonetta McGee, hopelessly miscast as Eastwood's lover and a fellow agent; Jack Cassidy, hamming up his role as a homosexual ex-partner of Eastwood's; George Kennedy, fresh from his Cool Hand Luke Oscar as Eastwood's good buddy mountain climber; and Gregory Walcott as the obnoxious henchman of David's, who also likes to chew up his scenery. After a fairly suspenseful opening in which an agent is killed for secret microfilm, the movie plods along until its climax. I don't know why Eastwood chose to spend so much time showing us the Arizona landscape and his "working out to get in shape" for the climb scenes. They're drawn out and impede suspense possibilities. The movie is okay for a 1970's flick, but it pales in comparison to most of Clint's later work. |
| Rating | | | Date | February 14, 2005 | | Summary | Hemlock | Content
| Now did he throw six snowballs or was it only five? To tell you the truth, I kinda lost track myself in all this boredom.
Hemlock? Leave it out. Whose called Hemlock? Do I look like a Hemlock? Yeah, more like Jack Crabsbelow. How many people have surnames that fit their chosen profession? George W Blunder. Pamela Airhead? Actually, I do recall a dog-catcher named Jackie Russel. Bang goes another smartypants review. |
| Rating | | | Date | September 20, 2004 | | Summary | I Wanted to Like it More.... | Content
| Every Clint Eastwood fan will grin at the witty one-liners and sit on the edge of the seat for the mountain climbing sequences - very thrilling.
But the plot, acting, and the tempo of the film fall short of the high quality of Eastwood's best work.
This will kill a couple of hours on an airplane or in a terminal but won't remain long in the mind as a memorable film or performance. Thank goodness he went on to act and direct bigger and much better films.
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| Rating | | | Date | July 11, 2004 | | Summary | The Eiger Sanction | Content
| I purchased the Eiger Sanction, at Amazon.ca; unfortunately, when I began to play, it wouldn't play; it became stuck in the drawer of the DVD player.
I had to return the player to its vendor, Canadian Tire, in Montreal, where the wonderful people there, took the player apart, and gave me a new one, under the warranty.
So, consider this a warning to Amazon.ca, check each copy of the Eiger Sanction, before it is sold, for myself, I returned my copy, and will never order it again, unless you check it first. |
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