BootDigest
Such a frustrating disappointment
SanEat
A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
Dirtylogy
It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
FloodClearwater
Gorky Park is William Hurt's finest film role, bar none.It is 1983, it is Moscow, and Hurt is Arkady Renko, a skilled but low-rung detective for the local military police, known as the Militia.Renko is called one wintry night to the scene of a grisly triple murder, the bodies found hard by the public skating rink of Gorky Park. As soon as he arrives to the scene, so do the lethal agents of the Militia's rival agency, the KGB. Renko not only has a hard case to solve, he's got hard rivals watching as he tries to go about it. Strange.The film leaps from a delicately constructed whodunit into a major drama within minutes, as Renko happens across his first witness, the young Russian film assistant Irina. Searingly acted by the gifted Joanna Pacula, there is instant chemistry, confusion, and delightful tension between the male and female leads, and it starts the viewer off into a more modernized version of Casablanca, but with a winching plot that actually keeps us on edge. With two major exceptions, the wider cast of "Soviets" are British, and they are a group of supporting all-stars. Ian Bannen as the viperish prosecutor Iamskoy and Ian "Palpatine" McDiarmid in a heavy cameo as a creepy-cool facial reconstructionist deserve special mention. Lee Marvin and Brian Dennehy are Hurt's co-stars. Both play Americans. For the unwatched, it would spoil some of the fun to hint at whether either of their characters is the heavy, rather it suffices to say that Marvin's role is quintessential Marvin and Dennehy has never done a better Dennehy role than his turn in this film. You get just what those names promise from the Playbill. But William Hurt is the film's core, soul, and mainstay. He does it all, from fighting to quiet psychologies to loving on the stunning, vulnerable, feral Irina, with a deep, brooding, unaffected humanity and sense of the inexorable. Hurt is a wonderful actor and he truly is Shakespearean in stature here as "Arkady beset by Moscow."One quibble. The film's opening credit sequence and introductory shots were economized. With a larger investment and more thoughtful ideas for the main title sequence, perhaps some minor re-jiggering of imagery of the fallen snow as metaphor for the rest of the film, Gorky Park might today be talked about alongside a Breakfast at Tiffany's or a Lawrence of Arabia. The remainder of the film is about that great. Film students and aspiring auteurs should watch Gorky Park, again and again.
SnoopyStyle
Arkady Renko (William Hurt) is a Moscow police detective. They find three bodies in Gorky Park with their faces and fingers cut off. KGB arrives right away but nobody wants the case. The girl was wearing skates stolen from Irina Asanova (Joanna Pacula). As Arkady investigates, the case leads to the government with possible KGB connections. Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin) is an American with government influence and dating Irina. William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy) is an American looking for his brother James. Soon Osborne becomes a prime suspect.This has a bit of quite a few different genre. It's got the CSI police investigation thriller. It has that cold moody murder like a Scandinavian murder mystery. It also has the communist KGB political intrigue. In the center of it all, William Hurt holds the movie together in a murky police/political thriller. It just has a great murder mystery mood.
Brundlefly
I've always wanted to see this film but didn't until I watched it on NetFlix in 2010.The main problem with this film is the screenplay - I didn't read the book, but I am guessing the screenplay is very faithful, because it plays like Masterpiece Theatre with a budget.As a result, its a long movie, but I suspect it was much longer as their are some situations and scenes which seem to have had supporting scenes which were cut.There is just no interesting flow to this movie at all, the characters and relationships are very poorly developed, and the actors don't seem to have any significant investment in their characters or motivations either. Its almost like watching a long screen test.Which is too bad - WIlliam Hurt and Brian Denehy are great actors, but could have both been replaced with competent unknowns - it probably would have been a better film, actually, as the viewer wouldn't keep asking themselves 'Why is Hurt acting like a limp noodle?' or 'Was Brian Denehy attached to this project late?'There is no voice coaching in this movie - everyone speaks English - which is fine, since its an American movie - but the actor's individual accents are not coached out - the Russians in this movie mostly speak with British accents, but they vary into other accents as well. No Russian is fine, but at least keep the accents consistent.There are some weird moments in the movie also - like 'how do the police come to know this pristine snow blanket is covering a murder scene"? Or 'Why did William Hurt just profess love to someone he barely knows?' or 'Why is William Hurt completely unconcerned that the man he has come to kill just pulled a pistol out of a drawer and loaded it?' or 'Why did Lee Marvin take that pistol out of the drawer in the first place'?Its obvious stuff like this was taken out of the book, which had explanatory non-dialog text which put it into context, but when transferred to the screen, they forgot that the audience does not have access to that text.An occasional musical interlude of 80's synth pad and drum machine also painfully dates the movie at certain points.Anyways, a real yawner that seemed to try to capitalize on a bestselling book by throwing some budget and talent into a big vat with a book and stirring - but no one really bothered to make a movie here.
gelman@attglobal.net
It's never been clear to me why anyone ever thought of William Hurt as a particularly good actor. He's over-matched in this mystery story by his co-stars, Lee Marvin, Brian Dennehy and Joanna Pacula. If director Michael Apted asked Hurt to show restraint, he certainly obeyed the order. His character, a Russian police inspector being used by superiors in a triple murder that might have been committed by the KGB, might display self-restraint but Hurt seemed to this viewer to display no emotion whatever during most of the film. On the other hand, Brian Dennehy as a New York police detective interested in the case because his brother was one of the victims and Lee Marvin as an American rich because of his central role in the illegal ermine trade may be guilty of overacting but they succeed in making their less interesting characters more interesting than Hurt's. The surprise in this film is Joanna Pacula as a friend of the three victims who herself is hoping to escape Russia for the West, which is what they were hoping to do. She's the one personality in the film who seems able to show genuine emotion. Her love affair with Hurt's police inspector is plausible but who would fall in love with such a wooden creature?
