Amazon.com video review:
Roland Joffé (The Killing
Fields) directs this fuzzy effort at a David Lean-like epic
without David Lean's sense of emotional proportion. Lean's most
important screenwriting collaborator, Robert Bolt, in fact wrote
The Mission, which concerns a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons)
who establishes a church in the hostile jungles of Brazil and then
finds his work threatened by greed and political forces among his
superiors. Robert De Niro is briefly effective as a callous soldier
who kills his own brother and then turns to Irons's character to
oversee his penance and conversion to the clergy. The narrative and
dramatic forces at work in this movie should be more stirring and
powerful than they are--the problem being that Joffé is too
removed from them to allow us in. --Tom Keogh
