In the time just preceding Castro's takeover of Cuba, an American gambler in Havana gets involved with a revolutionary's wife. Overlong but otherwise well produced!
Elaborate visual mounting and iconographic placement of the romantic leads are the movie's preoccupation, with the overthrow of Batista merely providing local color.
Director Sydney Pollack and star Robert Redford have lost their normally dependable quality touch as they slog through a notably uncompelling $45 million-plus tale of a gringo caught up in the Cuban revolution.
The glittering decadence of this culture on the verge of collapse is in fact the film's most fascinating aspect, and Mr. Pollack has re-created it extravagantly.
At best, Pollack achieves a counterfeit sense of this atmosphere. But he insists on continuing the card game anyway, an over-extended misdeal of a movie that refuses to fold.
Handsomely produced, with a typically mesmerizing performance by Redford, alas this fails to exploit its intriguing political background and ends up being more of a routine and ineffective romance.
Unfortunately, against that impressive backdrop, Pollack mounts a film that is lifeless and slow-moving, offering neither a compelling love story nor a tense tale of a city in turmoil.
Now that the flixster summary mentions it, the story in this movie is a lot like a Casablanca copycat. Anyway, I thought it was way too slow and dull, I didn't care a bit about the main character, he was so boring. The most interesting parts are skipped over, for example when Raul Julia's intriguing character is
killed off quickly. And it just gets worse from there, changing from a thriller to a romance to a political drama and back again. It doesn't know where it's going.
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