Film Review: Deal of the Century (1983)
The end of New Hollywood marked the change of fortune for many of its prominent personalities, but few had it so extreme as William Friedkin. Director famed for winning “Oscar” and smashing box office records in 1970s began in 1980s making films that were, with few notable exceptions like To Live and Die in L.A., huge disappointments. One of them was 1983 comedy Deal of the Century.
The protagonist and narrator, played by Chevy Chase, is Eddie Muntz, small-time American arms dealer who comes to fictional Latin American country of San Miguel to sell weapons to local leftist revolutionaries. The deal ends disastrously but Muntz’s luck suddenly changes when he accidentally stumbles into Harold DeVoto (played by Wallace Shawn), mentally unstable sales representative for Luckup, major US weapons manufacturer. Harold, frustrated with his inability to sell Peacemaker, the revolutionary model of combat drone, to the ruling regime of General Cardoza (played by William Marquez), commits suicide. Muntz uses the opportunity to simply take the negotiations and successfully closes the deal. Things get complicated when he returns to USA, where he is confronted by DeVoto’s beautiful widow Catherine (played by Sigourney Weaver) who wants the commission that was supposed to go to her late husband. Muntz also experiences hostility by Luckup’s greedy executive Frank Stryker (played by Vince Edwards). When San Miguel reneges on the deal, Stryker sends Muntz to renegotiate it. In the meantime, Muntz’s old friend, trusted associate and former test pilot Ray Kasternak (played by Gregory Hines) is about to become born-again Christian and has trouble reconciling arms trade with his religious views.
Script by Paul Brickman deals with a serious subject that was quite relevant for the world of its time and is, sadly, even more relevant for the world today. Arms trade is the most lucrative sector of the world economy, but also the most destructive, due to the way it fuels arms race, corruption and endless bloody conflicts that could have ended long time ago. The film states something that became quite evident after the shameful American exit from Afghanistan – purpose of many modern wars is not to achieve traditional aims of establishing or protecting someone’s hegemony, but to make weapons manufacturers insanely rich by preserving constant demand for their expensive and destructive products. This point is explicitly made in the best scene of the film, in which Richard Libertini plays rich and influential arms dealer obviously modelled after Adnan Khashoggi.
Unfortunately, this powerful and uncomfortable message is drowned in conceptual chaos created by film’s authors. Deal of the Century could have worked as powerful drama or dark satirical comedy. Friedkin instead opts for strange and predictably unsuccessful compromise between two. The comedy seems forced and drowned by some serious and unpleasant content that includes suicides, graphic depictions of debilitating injuries and the protagonist who pimps his girlfriend to despicable tinpot dictator. It is hard to find anything particularly funny in this film, and the scriptwriter sometimes tries to compensate it by demonstration of destructive powers of different weapons like assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, flamethrowers and, finally, jet fighters in the final showdown that features some interesting special effects. But all this is hardly to impress the audience, faced with mostly unsympathetic characters and complete lack of chemistry between Chase and Weaver. Gregory Hines is the only character whom the viewers could relate to , but he appears too late to rescue this film. Twenty years later Friedkin refused to write a single word about Deal of the Century in his memoirs and those who sit through this get an idea why.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
Leofinance blog https://leofinance.io/@drax.leo
Cent profile https://beta.cent.co/@drax
Minds profile https://www.minds.com/drax_rp_nc
Uptrennd profile https://www.uptrennd.com/user/MTYzNA
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e
BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/20545-deal-of-the-century
Critic: A