Rating: PG
Genre:
Action
Release Date: 07/01/2008
Dubbed: English
Sound: DD2
Run Time: 120 Minutes
Flags: Brief Nudity, Suitable for Children, Adult Language
Distributor/Studio: Paramount Pictures/Legend Films
This film showed up on TV as
Forbidden Paradise, but you can't fool us. It's really
The Hurricane, producer
Dino De Laurentiis' ill-advised remake of the 1938
Sam Goldwyn production of the same name. The story of the casual cruelties imposed by the white ruling class on the natives of the isle of Manakoora had the advantage of timeliness in 1938; forty-one years later, the story plays like a
Gilligan's Island amateur production of
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Playing the old
Jon Hall role of the native lad whose rambunctiousness incurs the wrath of the provincial governor, the uniquely ungifted
Daton Kane makes Hall look like
Sir John Gielgud. Even the expensive hurricane finale (which ate up most of the film's $22 million budget) isn't one-tenth as exciting as the corresponding sequence in the earlier film. The saddest aspect of the 1979
The Hurricane is that it was directed by
Jan Troell, who showed flashes of brilliance in his earlier
The Emigrants and
Zandy's Bride; perhaps significantly, Troell hightailed it back to Sweden after wrapping up his obligation to Dino De Laurentiis.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide