150 Word Review: 'Sorcerer' (1977)

It's dynamite

Photo: Universal Pictures

I like to think that if I were an adult during the summer of 1977, I would have dismissed mega-hit Star Wars as kids’ stuff and proclaimed William Friedkin's sweaty jungle noir Sorcerer the movie of the year. It flopped.

In Friedkin's unloved masterpiece, four international criminals on the run find themselves trapped in a remote Colombian village, broke, desperate, and at the mercy of the corrupt local police.

But then a powerful American oil company makes them a deal: drive a pair of trucks loaded with unstable, highly explosive nitroglycerin down bumpy, winding roads and over creaky rope bridges without blowing up and make enough money to escape purgatory.

The cast includes Bruno Cremer as a white-collar crook who longs for the wife he left behind in Paris and Roy Scheider as a mobster marked for death. Scheider is at his hangdog best as a real son of a—

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