SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Bereamic Awesome Movie

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

drystyx This is formula tough guy vs tough guy manhunt. It's based on an actual incident, and changed to meet Hollywood iconic stereotypes of godlike men.In truth, the real manhunt was for a vicious killer, resulting in a little bit of what we see on film. As far as "literary license" goes, this is not as bad as most movies. However, the real killer was a killer, and was caught.Here, Bronson plays a man wrongly accused, as suits Hollywood. Thanks to Hollywood, people now see fit to judge guilt based on how they feel about the person politically. That's changed a bit in the last ten years, but in the seventies and eighties, it was very racist.Bronson's character is likable, though. He does what he needs to survive. As a story on its own, if one wants to call it a fiction piece, it works very well. Lee Marvin is a good grunting sort of mountie who takes on the aristocratic sort of mountie rookie, the idealist so popular in this era, who would learn that grunting is better than being civilized.The real story comes with the supporting characters. Three in particular, who have a later rendezvous with destiny. An old trapper, and a pair of trappers who are low in the pecking order, one of them completely on the bottom, the other who bullies him around.It is a story mostly of the pecking order of bullies in the savage wilderness. That part is done fairly well. It could have been much worse.

Scott LeBrun Decent if unexceptional chase / survival thriller benefits from a solid cast, interesting characters, breathtaking scenery, and a compelling enough story, based on (or maybe the operative words should be "inspired by") history. The true story is touted as one of the most intense manhunts ever, and I am sure it would make for fascinating reading.Two legendary cinema tough guys play pursuer and the pursued; Charles Bronson is Albert Johnson, a solitary man forced to kill in self-defense. Lee Marvin is Edgar Millen, the Royal Canadian Mountie who is obliged to track him down, but who respects him far too much to want to see him bagged by a greed-motivated bounty hunter or an overly ambitious pilot.Ultimately, the movie doesn't deliver too much on the action front; the action scenes are certainly competent but there aren't too many of them, and we really don't get a sense of the characters having to endure any real hardships, despite the potentially riveting man vs. nature element of the story.Still, "Death Hunt" does manage to entertain well enough even if it's not terribly memorable in the end. Its period recreation is effective (the story takes place at the tail end of 1931 in Canada's Yukon Territory) and there are some great scenes and images. It's just too cool to see Bronson - in one of his better performances - emerge from the rubble of his destroyed cabin with both guns a-blazing. The music by Jerrold Immel and cinematography by James Devis are noteworthy, as well as a prominent male milieu, headed by greats Bronson and Marvin; Andrew Stevens is baby faced, by-the-book young Mountie Alvin, Carl Weathers the easygoing "Sundog", veteran screen heavy Ed Lauter the troublemaker Hasel, and an under utilized Angie Dickinson in an obligatory (and brief) love interest role. Lots of great character faces here, too: Henry Beckman, William Sanderson, Jon Cedar, Len Lesser, Richard Davalos, Maury Chaykin, August Schellenberg, Sean McCann, and Tantoo Cardinal. Chaykin and Schellenberg add silly comedy relief as two constantly bickering thugs.Overall, this is good stuff if not as great as it could and should have been. At least it's a good example of a thriller with a refreshingly old fashioned, straightforward appeal and which doesn't over saturate itself with special effects. It even works in a comment on the nature of tradition vs. progress, which in this story is represented by radios and aviation. All in all, it may give in to predictability rather than nuance, and not be too faithful to the true story, but it provides acceptable entertainment.Seven out of 10.

vostf The production team had a very powerful true story to build upon, but they just tacked Bronson and Marvin in a loose adaptation and felt content with it. In the end, the biggest flaw of all is there's hardly a Death Hunt taking place. The whole picture fumbles with geographical continuity so much that suspense is never gaining momentum. Aerial shots of abrupt snowy slopes contrast with the ground shots where actors happen to run on a mostly flat soil, with little snow most of the time.Thus the chase looks more like a veteran's trekking in the mountains. Peter Hunt was supposed to be an innovative editor, but he constantly failed to prove he could edit pictures in his head to achieve remarkable results as a director. All the chase sequences feel disjointed, shot at various locations. Bronson is in sight, then he escapes, and then again he seems cornered by the Mountie posse soon joined by the improvised bounty hunters coming out of the wild, simply catching up with the unrelenting chase (ok Bronson is supposed to zigzag and the plane helps to locate him very closely, but little is done to make this a consistent narrative feature).Eventually it's a poor rendition of a fantastic true story only because the guys involved took the pedestrian path to a Death Hunt in the Arctic wilderness. The R-rated bullet impacts or the wasteful Angie Dickinson cameo are further evidence of a cheap-shots-oriented production.

MARIO GAUCI This is one of Charles Bronson's more popular vehicles (though I've missed it more than I care to remember in the past!) – as much for his pairing with Lee Marvin as for the tough, snow-bound action of the plot.The film, in fact, is based on true events depicting a bloody manhunt which has gone down in history; ironically, its source seems to have been a trivial argument about possession of a wounded dog! While the location photography is pretty spectacular, the narrative tightly-paced and the action sequences undeniably well-handled (Peter Hunt being a veteran of James Bond movies as both editor and director), it's unfortunate that characterization – the posse grows in number once a bounty is offered for the capture of trapper Bronson – is mostly relegated to unpleasant stock types.Even if both stars (who only get to share one scene) were clearly ageing by this time, they bring conviction to their respective roles: Bronson demonstrates his characteristic quiet fortitude as the hunted man, while Marvin is the experienced and tenacious lawman on his trail (but whose cynicism gives way towards the end to reveal an essential humanism underneath). Angie Dickinson briefly supplies the redundant love interest to Marvin's character; this was the last of their three pairings – the other titles being the far superior THE KILLERS (1964) and POINT BLANK (1967).