Continental Divide

Dreadfully dull and formulaic romance, with a pace that would bore a sloth to death. Watching Belushi being forced into physical comedy as well as dramatic acting, is like watching a bear in a cage, being forced to dance for your entertainment purposes. It may be chuckleworthy to begin with, but after a while the wrongness of the situation creeps in, leaving the viewer at first uncomfortable and sad, later uninterested and possibly peckish.

Score based on distant memory.

After watching this movie, I was no longer sad that John Belushi died so young.

68.500

68.500

Blair Brown is wonderful (especially beating up on hunters and shattering their shotguns) but it is a looooooong twenty minutes till she gets there; Belushi's charms are hopeless against the stillborn set-up and the material doesn't do him many favors once things get going. It's not that he's unbelievable as a comic-romantic lead, but the jaded journo schtick stifles that which makes him believable as one. The doomed Malle Abscam movie woulda been cool but oh what Elaine May coulda done wif'm...

I kinda skipped through most of it since it was so predictable it was painful to watch at times. But somehow it has that 80s charm and optimism that doesn't make it a complete nuisance.