Saying “Southern Comfort” is a poor man’s “Deliverance” is an insult to the economically challenged.
The 1981 film similarly pit modern man versus uber-hillbillies in a battle to the death.
But while “Deliverance” proved alternately profound and shocking, “Southern Comfort’s” modest rewards are all on the surface.
You may have rooted for the “Deliverance” quartet to survive – watch out, Ned! – but these “Southern” soldiers barely deserve our pity.
Powers Boothe, even less expressive than usual, supplies the voice of reason amidst a group of dumber than dumb National Guardsmen.
He plays Cpl. Hardin, a recent addition to a Louisiana Guard unit asked to fulfill a menial task in the state’s murky woods. They quickly get lost in the muck but stumble upon a small group of boats which could help them get back on track.
They decide to “borrow” the boats to complete their mission, showing little regret for their actions. When the boats’ owners show up one Guardsman fires at them with blank rounds as a gag.
Ha ha.
The Guardsmen quickly find out the boat owners’ guns don’t use blanks, and the battle between hardened warriors and the faceless locals begins.
“Comfort” introduces us to a colorful group of actors including Keith Carradine, Fred Ward and Peter Coyote, but the film’s flat script doesn’t flesh out their back stories or show them as ready for so much as a spitball fight.
The “Buck Privates” could take out these clown soldiers.
The soldiers take turns acting in a sophomoric fashion, disobeying basic rules of combat and wasting ammo at nearly every turn.
Perhaps it’s another layer of anti-Vietnam War sentiment on display here – U.S. soldiers enter a foreign land and fall prey to their own ignorance. If that’s the case, the talking points backfire. It crushes any chance we have of rallying around the dwindling band of heroes.
We do hear a few lines that play to the racism streaked through the era’s southern culture – the film is set in the early 1970s. But the theme is quickly discarded.
Director Walter Hill (“48 Hours”) stages the action sequence in a competent fashion, nothing more, but the rootsy score by Ry Cooder enhances even the most rudimentary sequences.
The film’s final 15 minutes push beyond our expectations, but we’ve already been disconnected from the key players by then.
“Southern Comfort” could have spun the “Deliverance” theme in fresh directions. Instead, the film falls back on familiar survival techniques played out by soldiers who could barely graduate from basic training.
(Photo: Powers Boothe, left, and Keith Carradine play National Guardsman battling armed to the teeth rednecks in “Southern Comfort.”)
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This is one of those movies that makes a person who knows a little about guns wonder, is the apparent error involving firearms a deliberate part of the plot, or are the filmmakers just ignorant? The answer here, as almost always is, they’re just ignorant. If the National Guardsmen are on an exercise that requires them to shoot blanks, the rifles would have big yellow blank-firing devices on the muzzles. Without those things, the M-16 could not fire blanks. Never mind that, anyone as gun-savvy as the Cajuns obviously are would know that they were not being fired at with live ammo. From the lack of the deadly hornet’s buzz of a bullet passing nearby. So are the Cajuns avenging what they think is attempted murder, or are they avenging the “borrowing” of their boats? I think we are supposed to think they believed themselves to have been fired on. But it’s too annoying to allow me to enjoy the movie, it’s a gesture of contempt for anyone in the know, like Kerry’s insisting he got a Silver Star “with valor device” when such a decoration does not exist. I think that was aimed straight at fellow Viet Nam veterans.