“You've Broken the Law of Good Cinema.” Quentin Tarantino is Annoyed with an Action Fillm Starring Harrison Ford. He Would Send the Director of This Production to “Movie Jail”
Quentin Tarantino was outraged by the resolution of a conflict in an action thriller starring Harrison Ford. The film fell out of favor with the famous director by the end.
Quentin Tarantino very often speaks about the films of other filmmakers. Some he praises, others he points out mistakes, and in the second group was a production starring Harrison Ford. The filmmaker stated that the 1992 action thriller “broke the law of good cinema” and its creator deserves to be sent to “movie jail.”
We are talking about Patriot Games, directed by Phillip Noyce. In this movie, Ford took over the role of Jack Ryan, who, as a result of unfortunate events, found himself on the radar of a dangerous terrorist. The very story of revenge in this film was considered by Tarantino to be a good one, although he had some objections to it, during an interview with Dennis Hopper he admitted that the story of two men who want to take revenge on each other is interesting.
The biggest problem occurred only at the end of the film, when it came time to resolve the conflict between the main character and his opponent. At this point Noyce's production lost Tarantino's sympathy.
But then they get into this stupid fight on this boat, and they do the thing that my friends and I despised the most: Harrison Ford hits the guy and he falls on an anchor and it kills him. And it's like you can hear a committee thinking about this and saying, "Well, he killed him with his own hands, but he didn't really mean to kill him, you know, so he can go back to his family, and his daughter, and his wife and still be an okay guy. He caused the death but it was kind of accidental." And as far as I'm concerned, the minute you kill your bad guy by having him fall on something, you should go to movie jail, all right. You've broken the law of good cinema.
In many films, conflicts are resolved in such a incidental manner that the main character is not recognized as a cold-blooded killer. This is a safe approach by filmmakers worried about getting the protagonists' hands dirty, which apparently outrages Tarantino, who doesn't want to see the antagonists die by accident and the protagonists return to their families and can still be good people.
