| Warner Bros. | Release Date: September 17, 1982 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
5
Mixed:
2
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
It's a stylish, entertaining movie, starring Frederic Forrest (a dead ringer for Hammett, bar the height) as a drinking, smoking, coughing and typewriter-bashing writer lured back into detection by an old Pinkerton associate (Peter Boyle) and stumbling into the plot of The Maltese Falcon.
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Hammett, the first major American movie by Wim Wenders, isn't quite the mess one might expect, considering the length of time it's been in production and the number of people who seem to have contributed to it. It's not ever boring, but heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made. One answer would serve both questions.
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Over polished by too many script rewrites, perhaps emasculated by massive footage scraps and belated re-shoots, project emerges a rather suffocating film taking place in a rickety Chinatown.
The picture is an inventory of film noir effects and attitudes, but Wenders has nothing new to say about the style, about the period, about Hammett or about the creative process. The Hammett case can be closed: a case of massive esthetic masturbation. [18 Sep 1982]
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