Reseñas de la crítica

...The perverse gambit of Sorcerer, and Friedkin's work generally, is to take a certain amount of joy in this cosmic pessimism. A maxim from the great Romanian poet-philosopher Emil Cioran could serve as the epigraph to Friedkin's filmography: "The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one.

A certain kind of moviegoer is going to find this unspeakably satisfying (fans of Sam Peckinpah's hot-spot misadventures like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). By the time Sorcerer gets around to its rain-soaked, rickety-bridge set piece, you'll either be obsessed or fully checked out. Give yourself a chance to pick sides.

Almost invisible in the original, the natives here are more restive. Nature is also more malevolent; at one point, the trees and vines seem to reach out of the jungle to trap the trucks. Mr. Friedkin's explosions are more elaborate, and his ending is more fatalistic than Clouzot's, but if "The Wages of Fear" seemed to have something to do with the atomic bomb, "Sorcerer" is very much a movie about the disaster of its own making.

I've been on the fence about "Sorcerer" since I saw it on home video over 20 years ago. Friedkin's brutal, grubby sensibility is perfectly suited to the story of four down-at-their-heels tough guys (led by a characteristically understated Roy Scheider, who gives great closeup), and the film has many virtues, including its overwhelmingly tactile imagery and Tangerine Dream's trance-inducing synthesized score, which was "dated" within a few years of its composition but now sounds pleasingly of-the-era.

In his biography, Friedkin confesses that Sorcerer is the film he put his soul into. His magnum opus. His previous films, The French Connection and The Exorcist, showing a young director forcing the evolution of affective storytelling in motion pictures. He made audiences believe the impossible. Sorcerer was his first real statement as an artist. Death is everywhere, and for the first time, Friedkin luxuriates in it, the score by Tangerine Dream accentuating the... sweaty, paranoid milieu.

In less than 10 minutes, the film establishes its primary themes of sound, time, and memory, all of which Friedkin exercises through the confines of a genre film... Sorcerer is the nightmarish inverse of mellifluous fantasia: a symphonic, boundary-pushing masterwork.

It's easy to over-romanticize the physical effort that went into these scenes in an age of quick-fix CGI solutions, but understating the case won't do, either. No less than Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1975) or Fitzcarraldo (1982), Sorcerer endures in part as a document of filmmakers triumphing over the elements right along with their characters.

Some have even slapped the term "masterpiece" on it. But there's no need to over-praise a movie that as a whole somehow fails to gel. Because there are still many moments stunning in their beauty and sheer oddity... Roy Scheider's face creases, filthy hands, and sheer weariness perfectly embody the film's mood of despair, one best experienced on a big screen.

The image of trucks getting over the bridge comes at the climax of the movie's most celebrated sequence, which reportedly took three months to shoot. This exacting account of men overcoming the elements anticipates the famous boat-lifting sequence of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982)—much as Friedkin's portrait of the South American jungle as a verdant hell on earth recalls Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972).

Friedkin's maldit analysis of The Wages of Fear retains Clouzot's perverse punchline and adds plenty of its own -- the contrast between the glazed escargot inside a fancy restaurant and the brains splattered outside it, the effect a shovel has on a guerilla fighter's jugular, the ineffable eroticizing of the village's only woman, a toothless crone.

William Friedkin's remake of the French thriller Wages of Fear represents an above-average effort by the director of The Exorcist—meaning it's marginally watchable. Friedkin senselessly complicates the simple story—four men drive a truckload of nitro through a South American jungle—with a lengthy exposition and some unfortunate existential overtones. The rhythms are all off—it's either too fast or too slow—but most of the set pieces are effective.