Harrison Ford capably tackles a tough, unlikable role, producing a fascinating and strange character study. Read critic reviews
The Mosquito Coast
1986, Adventure/Drama, 1h 58m
22 Reviews 10,000+ RatingsWhat to know
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Movie Info
A brilliant but unstable inventor and his family create what they hope will be their Utopia in Central America.
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Rating: PG
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Genre: Adventure, Drama
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Original Language: English
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Director: Peter Weir
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Producer: Jerome Hellman
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Writer: Paul Schrader
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Release Date (Theaters): wide
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Release Date (Streaming):
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Box Office (Gross USA): $12.9M
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Runtime:
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Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
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Sound Mix: Surround
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Critic Reviews for The Mosquito Coast
Audience Reviews for The Mosquito Coast
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This was just a very, very good film. I've heard a lot about it, particularly that it didn't make a lot of money at the box office because audiences didn't want to see Harrison as a potentially-dangerous anti-hero instead of as the straight good guy people came to know and love the actor as. It's really thought-provoking, and very well-shot. Peter Weir is a director whom I admire a lot and had earlier worked with Ford on "Witness", and would go on to direct films such as 'The Truman Show' and 'Master and Commander'. In this film, Ford plays a radical, somewhat crazy inventor who is tired of what he perceives as overly-commercialised, lazy American culture and uproots his entire family, including his wife (Helen Mirren) and oldest son (River Phoenix) to a remote jungle location along the Mosquito Coast of the title. There, he sets up his own town, building "civillisation" from scratch, but his extreme ideals push him to the edge and endanger his family, and he becomes blinded by his vision, ironic as that sounds. This film proves Ford has range, he plays a wild-eyed, unstable man very well and all the while you still have a shred of sympathy for him even as he pushes the limit of what's acceptable for a father to do to his family over and over again. The location filming in Belize is gorgeous and you truly get a sense that you're off the beaten track and far from the known world, as it seems. It's also one of the last film appearances of Butterfly McQueen aka Prissy from 'Gone With the Wind'. I was watching the film with my mother and she said "hey, that sounds like the silly girl from Gone with the Wind" - and it was the same actress! Helen Mirren was great as usual as the hapless (and actually nameless) wife, pulled along for the insane adventure and loyal to her husband to a fault. River Phoenix's performance was also stunning and it is a huge, huge pity that he passed away so early on; he could have had a very luminous career as he clearly was a talented actor.
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I'll give Ford credit for playing such a thoroughly unlikable character so well, but the film is a mess. Weir can't decide what the central conflict is supposed to be and the family is so passive through most of the story that by the time they do stand up to Ford it doesn't make any sense. By the half way point I just started thinking about early Herzog films (specifically "Fitzcarraldo", "Aguirre: The Wrath of God", and "Heart of Glass") and how much better they deal with extreme obsession.
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The Mosquito Coast is an underated movie that I never heard of until it came on 1 of the movie channel's, I got to watch it & I was hooked from the start.I read a couple reviews saying this is Harrison Ford's best or most interesting peformance.I'm not a fan of Ford's at all but it's true.I think this is 1 of the very few roles of his that I didn't find boring & actually liked.A VERY good movie that makes me want to go out & read the book
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Harrison Ford, disillusioned with the banalities and commercialisms of everyday American life, drags his family into the jungle to some back-to -basics living. The story is excellent - you can tell it's based on a novel - and Ford brings completely to life a character both alluring and downright impossible "Charlie, your father is the worst kind of pain in the neck. A know-it-all who's sometimes right .I've come to see he's a dangerous man. You tell him that." .
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