Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

SnoopyStyle CIA director Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) does a deal with the Soviets and let them kill agent Laurence Fassett (John Hurt)'s wife. Fassett is unaware of the deal and is tracking down Soviet agent Omega. He tells TV personality John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) that his friends are all working for Omega. Tanner and his friends are gathering for the weekend. Fassett sets his home up with surveillance. Tanner tries to send his wife Ali (Meg Foster) and son away but they are almost kidnapped. Tanner's friends include his TV producer Bernard Osterman (Craig T. Nelson), plastic surgeon Richard Tremayne (Dennis Hopper) and his coke-snorting wife Virginia (Helen Shaver), and stock trader Joseph Cardone (Chris Sarandon) and wife Betty (Cassie Yates).This story is a mess and the execution doesn't solve anything. Director Sam Peckinpah's last feature film is full questionable things. It's too many to list. Even his action sequences are badly done. He overuses his trademark slow motion shots which seems very dated. Other action directors have pass him by. Then there is the plot. It's not simply plot holes but more about motivations. I don't understand why Fassett is doing what he's doing. It's all quite a mess.

Maziun *SPOILERS*SPOILERS*SPOILERS*SPOILERS*SPOILERS*SPOILERS*SPOILERS*This is the last movie of famous movie director Sam Peckinpah ("The Wild bunch" , "Bonnie and Clyde" ) . Unfortunately , this one belongs to his weaker movies . Too bad , because it had some real potential . The movie is based on Robert Ludlum novel with the same title . From what I've heard the screenplay was heavily rewritten, so in the end the movie isn't exactly too loyal to the book. Nevertheless it's the screenplay which is the biggest problem of the movie. I've seen this movie two times and I wasn't able to find the answers for my questions. I think "The Osterman weekend" has some big plot holes that destroy the movie. If Hurt was only interested in Hauer then why all the trouble ? Wasn't it much easier for him to kidnap his family and blackmail him ? After all he only wanted the interview . The murder of Hurts wife also doesn't makes sense . They really wanted to convince Hurt that her death was natural ? That she died from heart attack ? There was blood bleeding from her nose and they left a huge trace of needle on her nose , for God's sake. The actions of Hurts henchman are also idiotic. Hurt needs Hauer alive , but they doing everything they can to kill him. But the most stupid thing is the ending . The movie BETRAYS THE TWIST TO THE AUDIENCE that Hauer isn't in the studio while the interview is on TV. And how did Hauer find out where Hurt is ? He did used some kind of heat sensor , but how did he knew that he should go to the port (or wherever Hurt was hiding ) ?Peckinpah was sick while he was making "TOW" and it shows . The pacing is rather bad . The movie never seems to catch any kind of rhythm . Also , the slow motion scenes that Peckinpah is known for ( for modern audiences probably less than John Woo) here are looking absolutely awful . Very cheesy , with no dynamic and beauty. Bad montage . The music by Lalo Schifrin is also strangely inadequate. There is some impressive cast here : Rutger Hauer ( "Blade runner") , John Hurt ("1984") , Burt Lancaster ("Birdman of Alcatraz") , Dennis Hopper ("Blue Velvet") and Craig T. Nelson ("Poltergeist") . None of them fails . They all give really solid performances , especially Hauer and Hurt . Hauer doesn't quite fit the role of a TV journalist , but in the end I didn't mind it. There is some violence and nudity here . It's also interesting that both Ludlum and Peckinpah are showing us some kind of reality show before the idea of reality show even appeared. This is also the most intriguing part of the movie , when Peckinpah was able to create some true psychological tension between the characters.Still , this one was a disappointment . Not a total failure , but definitely below the expectations. I give it 4/10.

Bill Slocum It's Sam Peckinpah's last film, and as a fan of this brilliant, troubled man, I wanted it to be a good one to go out on. What I got instead is another of his problem pictures, an interesting premise and eye-raising performances done in by a loss of focus.John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) is a TV interviewer given an unpleasant assignment by CIA operative Lawrence Fassett (John Hurt): Confront a group of college friends with evidence they are working for a KGB operative named Mikalovich. An array of videotapes provided by Fassett demonstrates their culpability to Tanner. So he sets to work, his home the setting for a prearranged weekend gathering. If it works, a live interview with CIA Director Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) will be his reward.For Peckinpah, it was his first film in more than half-a-decade, and a chance to show he was still able to deliver a solid action film well after his gritty early-'70s peak. The CIA comes equipped with cool surveillance equipment and laser-sighted automatics. The Weekend itself, once it gets going, has a nice "Big Chill" vibe with paranoid undertones.So what goes wrong?It starts with a 40-minute intro that establishes the premise in clunky fashion. "I'm Cloak, you must be Dagger" Tanner says upon meeting Danforth, whom Lancaster plays with brio but not subtlety. "Being wrong is not nearly as important as not admitting it, not these days," he tells one Company weasel, and acts throughout as the kind of clod you wouldn't put in charge of a shoe store, let alone the CIA.Then we get to the Weekend itself, with Tanner's college friends taking center stage. Each has their quirks. Osterman (Craig T. Nelson) is a very cool TV producer who describes himself as "a nihilistic anarchist who lives on residuals". Nelson is great fun, though the rest of the group, including Dennis Hopper, gets lost in the mix. Only Helen Shaver's turn as a coked-out floozy stands out, as much for her gratuitous nude scenes as for her entertaining freak outs.Sappy lite-jazz music by Lalo Schifrin underscores a lack of suspense. Hauer's Dutch accent keeps creeping in like Nastassja Kinski's, and his fragile relationship with his bow-toting wife (Meg Foster) isn't developed any more than those with his once-merry, now-sullen Berkeley chums.The actual jigsaw puzzle we get here is indifferently assembled and seems at end a few pieces short. At one point Tanner hears Osterman on tape tell his friends "Let's go to our friend John Tanner's house and set him up". Tanner doesn't take this kindly, reasonably enough, yet what Osterman may have meant is never explained. A lot of threads are pulled out this way only to be left floating in the breeze.John Coquillon's cinematography does capture something the rest of the film flails at, a sense of mystery and foreboding. Hurt's tortured performance as Fassett is nicely underplayed, watching beady-eyed between sips of wine from a china cup as the gears shift into play. And Nelson does crack me up, as in one scene which finds him running for cover."It'd be nice if we had weapons!""We do!" he is told. "Bows!""Bows?" Osterman replies. "That's keen!"In the end, we get a wrap-up lecture about the pervading influence of television and how this all was, as one character puts it, "just another episode in this snuff soap opera we're all in." Peckinpah supposedly hated this script, only using it because he needed the film, but I think those sad words represent his actual mindset all-too-well. Distrait, somewhat lethargic, and depressing, "The Osterman Weekend" gives us lots of clues but no answers as to where Sam fell off.

jaibo Nobody should claim too much for Sam Peckinpah's final movie, yet it's an intriguing work which communicates - in the midst of a lot of confusion, grandstanding and fustian - a real sense of unease about Western pseudo-democracies and their broadcast media.Rutger Hauer plays a David Frost-type chat show host who has made a career out of grilling powerful government and military big-wigs. He finds himself caught in the middle of a CIA action against three of his former college friends, who are alleged to be traitors. CIA operative John Hurt installs state-of-the-art surveillance equipment in Hauer's home and when the three friends come over for one of their regular reunion weekends all hell breaks loose, with accusations, counter-accusations, set-ups and assassinations the order of play. Eventually it becomes clear that Hauer and his friends have been entrammelled in Hurt's plot to revenge himself on his boss, Burt Lancaster, who green-lighted the murder of Hurt's wife some time in the past.All of this makes The Osterman Weekend your usual le Carré-type spy story. Yet the film has wider ambitions, as the surveillance and final showdown on TV are straining to say something about the way in which the media mediates every act we perform. The final showdown between Hauer, Hurt and Lancaster is enacted on a seemingly live talk show, a kind of untra-violent version of Frost/Nixon, and in the end Hauer does a Howard Beale and challenges his audience to turn him off with their last remaining ounce of free will. In a way, the film is a companion piece to Cronenberg's contemporaneous Videodrome, but sadly The Osterman Weekend's critique of the media-age lacks that film's formal precision, and the final shift from formula spy pic to media apocalypse is unearned. Perhaps if the producers had allowed Peckinpah's original cut to be released, the film would be more consistent - those who've seen the VHS of the preview edition might enlighten us.As a Peckinpah film, The Osterman Weekend gives us another portrait of an individual forced to take action against the forces threatening his family, a la Straw Dogs. It shows a corporate/military establishment corrupt and murderous, a la Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It shows a group of friends torn apart when history and larger forces overtake them, a la The Wild Bunch. But it does so less convincingly than any of these previous films, and whilst its merits make it worth watching, it probably can't be thought of as anything but an intriguing coda to a remarkable career.