Amazon.com video review:
Living in exile in Paris after eluding a controversial charge
of statutory rape in America, director Roman Polanski seemed
professionally adrift during the 1980s, making only one film (the
ill-fated Pirates) between 1979 and 1988. Then Polanski found
inspiration--and a major star in Harrison Ford--to make
Frantic, a thriller that played directly into Polanski's gift
for creating an atmosphere of mystery, dread, escalating suspense, and
uncertain fate. Set in Paris (Polanski couldn't go to Hollywood, so
Hollywood came to him), the story begins when an American heart
surgeon (Ford) arrives in the City of Lights with his wife (Betty
Buckley) for a medical convention. They check into a posh hotel, and in
a brilliantly directed scene, Ford takes a shower and emerges to find
that his wife has vanished. This mysterious disappearance--and a
confusion between two identical pieces of luggage--leads Ford into the
Paris underground and a plot that grows increasingly dangerous as he
approaches the truth of his wife's disappearance. The plot gets too
complicated, and the pace drops off in the cluttered second half, but
in Polanski's capable hands the film is blessed with moments of
heightened suspense in the tradition of classic thrillers. --Jeff
Shannon
