“They’re wrong”: the panned film Harrison Ford insists is his best
Every actor makes at least a couple of bad movies, but it takes an especially brave one to die on the hill that it’s not. Fortunately, Harrison Ford has never been one to give a fuck what anyone else thinks.
He’s experienced a few failures in his time, and for the most part, he’s accepted that. Then again, there is the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, which he continues to pretend never existed in the first place, but most of his other catastrophes have been fair game for the star to admit defeat.
Ford has a soft spot for Kathryn Bigelow’s K19: The Widowmaker, but he also conceded that audiences did not, which is why it bombed at the box office. He made Hollywood Homicide because he fancied something light and fluffy, but when shooting began without a finished script, he knew it was doomed.
The first time he read the script for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, he threw it across the room in disgust. He still made it, and it flopped, but he was aware it would never be viewed as a work of cinematic art. However, Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast is a different matter, even if time has been kind to it.
Is it a bad movie? Not really, to be honest. If anything, it’s pretty good, with Ford playing against type as Allie Fox in one of his more unsung and underrated performances. Unfortunately, that re-evaluation didn’t come until long after its 1986 premiere, where it subsequently died a slow death in cinemas.
The initial reviews weren’t quite so kind, though, and instead of taking it on the chin, Ford opted to make the altogether riskier movie of telling everyone who didn’t rate the literary adaptation that they were wrong, he was right, and it was actually a really good movie that didn’t deserve the pasting it was taking.
“I think the film has been very unfairly treated in some quarters,” he reasoned, suggesting that never in his life had he seen “a serious film treated so badly by the critics.” Just because he loved it, it didn’t mean that everyone else would feel the same way, but he simply dug his heels in even deeper: “I think they’re wrong.”
Does he have a point? Well, if you’ve never seen The Mosquito Coast and fired it up today for the first time, you’re not going to be left thinking it’s Ford’s magnum opus. On the other hand, there’s a high chance you won’t be left thinking it’s crap, either, especially when it comes to his central turn.
You wouldn’t necessarily place it among the ten best movies the Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon has ever been in, but Allie Fox should make the cut for being one of his ten performances, which sums up the double-edged sword of The Mosquito Coast.
