This film only has 4 problems with it, that I can see. 1. Its raison d'être. 2. The screenplay. 3. The acting. 4. The directing. The actors, devoid of any visible passion, sleepwalk through their lines. The attempted "style" Pollack seems to be shooting for rings as tinny and artificial as Hollywood. The Left-loving and sun-damaged Redford does his best to act debonair, but maybe a bit too much. Lena is stunning as always, but her Prozac-induced acting serves only to make the film mildly amusing...and very mildly at that. The movie was doomed before Pollack ever yelled "action." It's as if a film school teacher hastily threw together a bunch of ingredients straight out of Casablanca, then instructed "only make it set in Havana...go!" and expected a masterpiece. Asking a viewer who's not a socialist himself to care about a cause as nefarious as Castro's Communist Cuba is a stretch for anyone with a modicum of patriotism and knowledge of history, no matter how beautiful the leading couple may try to be or how many gratuitous flesh scenes are thrown in. The parallels to the classic "Casablanca" are numerous and haranguing; from the film's city name to the suave man-about-town leading character who wonders if he should sacrifice his personal desires for a(n allegedly) greater cause, to his illicit love interest's being a married Swedish woman loyal to her husband's political passion. Besides being a shameless rip-off of an actually good motion picture, this film flops because it fails to make us care about anyone in it. Other than left-wing ideologues, who would ever feel moved to care about an adulterous gambler and a couple of communist revolutionaries? Victor Laszlo was on a valid mission--to combat the radical politics of worldwide domination, tyranny and murder. Rick and Ilsa fell in love before he ever found out about her marriage, and we cared because we felt they belonged together, yet understood the more compelling cause that forced them to remain apart. This film tried to copy a similar formula with the cause of Communist revolution, but we all know the results: a dictator far more murderous than Batista, who has kept his country mired in misery and mediocrity ever since.
Review of Havana
