When Robert Mitchum read the script for one of his earlier movies ("Second Chance"), he said it sounded like it was written by the producer's grandchildren. The same could be said about "The Amsterdam Kill".
Bob shows his years, as does his drinking buddy Richard Egan. Mind you, these guys had been in some great movies and must have sensed the lack of polish on this one.
Mitchum plays Quinlan, a disgraced former government agent who comes in from the cold when he is hired by the head of a major Chinese drug cartel in Amsterdam who wants to quit the business. Quinlan receives information to tip off agents played by Richard Egan, Leslie Nielson and Bradford Dillman to destroy the cartel. So it goes with double crosses, double agents and doubling back and forth between Hong Kong and Amsterdam.
Bob and the boys do a lot of talking on telephones or just walking and talking.
Action sequences occasionally punctuate the talkfest and are spectacular enough, but strangely cartoonish. Dispensable baddies are trampled to death by a herd of fat Dutch horses, a car bursts through a houseboat into an Amsterdam canal, and a huge greenhouse is methodically demolished by Bob in a bulldozer. None of it is remotely suspenseful.
Somehow director Robert Clouse convinced Mitchum to jump into that less than pristine Amsterdam canal, although the film company did offer to pay for a tetanus shot.
Despite real locations, the photography is as pedestrian as your aunt and uncle's movie of their recent trip. It also needed a sympathetic score, not the hackneyed tunes employed here, and it needed far less talk.
Author Lee Server wrote a brilliant biography of Robert Mitchum, "Baby' I don't Care". He described how relations grew toxic between an irate 60-year old Mitchum and the Chinese film crew in Hong Kong. Server also summed the whole thing up positing that, "... a behind-the-scenes "making of" documentary might have been more entertaining than the actual confused, simple-minded feature itself".
Bob shows his years, as does his drinking buddy Richard Egan. Mind you, these guys had been in some great movies and must have sensed the lack of polish on this one.
Mitchum plays Quinlan, a disgraced former government agent who comes in from the cold when he is hired by the head of a major Chinese drug cartel in Amsterdam who wants to quit the business. Quinlan receives information to tip off agents played by Richard Egan, Leslie Nielson and Bradford Dillman to destroy the cartel. So it goes with double crosses, double agents and doubling back and forth between Hong Kong and Amsterdam.
Bob and the boys do a lot of talking on telephones or just walking and talking.
Action sequences occasionally punctuate the talkfest and are spectacular enough, but strangely cartoonish. Dispensable baddies are trampled to death by a herd of fat Dutch horses, a car bursts through a houseboat into an Amsterdam canal, and a huge greenhouse is methodically demolished by Bob in a bulldozer. None of it is remotely suspenseful.
Somehow director Robert Clouse convinced Mitchum to jump into that less than pristine Amsterdam canal, although the film company did offer to pay for a tetanus shot.
Despite real locations, the photography is as pedestrian as your aunt and uncle's movie of their recent trip. It also needed a sympathetic score, not the hackneyed tunes employed here, and it needed far less talk.
Author Lee Server wrote a brilliant biography of Robert Mitchum, "Baby' I don't Care". He described how relations grew toxic between an irate 60-year old Mitchum and the Chinese film crew in Hong Kong. Server also summed the whole thing up positing that, "... a behind-the-scenes "making of" documentary might have been more entertaining than the actual confused, simple-minded feature itself".