Four Atlanta businessmen Intent on seeing the Cahulawassee River before it's turned into one huge lake go on a river-rafting trip they'll never forget into the dangerous American back-country. Their seemly casual trip eventually turns into a fight for survival.
This powerful adaptation of James Dickey's best-selling novel finds director John Boorman establishing a sense of menace almost from the start, and the "squeal like a pig" sequence continues to haunt viewers even decades after the fact.
So many of Dickey's lumpy narrative ideas remain in his screenplay that John Boorman's screen version becomes a lot less interesting than it has any right to be.
Cinemaphile.org
August 19, 2014
Boorman's film still speaks to us in profound ways, as if to indicate hidden wisdom has long rested in frames glossed up by a once-shocking philosophy.
