Monday, May 16, 2011

1982 - WRONG IS RIGHT, amazingly prescient film about the media is amazingly poorly made.


Unfortunately the writer/director Richard Brooks really dropped the ball when it came to filming Wrong Is Right.  He certainly was almost 30 years ahead in his vision of a media obsessed world.  Brooks foresaw reality TV, suicide bombers, middle east oil sheiks, media pop stars, crazy conservative and left wing politicians, and an attack on the World Trade Center by Arabs.   It was almost as if all of these things were too much for one film, the whole thing turned out to be a disaster.


The idea in Wrong Is Right was to combine a political thriller with a satire on the news media using the same model as Network.  Throughout the film the audience gets long winded rants about what is wrong with the media and the United States in general.  But the skill to weave it all together isn't there.  The film is an incoherent mess of ideas and action scenes which finally add up to nothing.


The cast was certainly game starting with Sean Connery as a globe trotting superstar reporter more important than the actual story he is working on.  The rest of the cast is a once in a film bunch of actors featuring, John Saxon, Leslie Nielson, Dean Stockwell, Henry Silva, Hardy Kruger, Katherine Ross and Robert Conrad.  All of them completely wasted.



Richard Brooks was a writer before he was a director and it's hard to believe he would let something  so full of plot contrivances, dead end story points and incoherence scenes get past the script stage, then again he never wrote any comedies much less a film with satire in it.

A big sloppy mess of a movie.

117 minutes.

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