Gorky Park
Director: Michael Apted
Year Released: 1983
Rating: 2.0
Cold War genre piece breaks the Soviet Union into its "Good Component" (the Militia, its citizens just trying to live peacefully) and its "Bad Component" (the KGB, anybody that flirts with capitalism) as "Good Russian" William Hurt tries to solve the murder of three individuals in the title amusement park. Aside from Hurt being painfully miscast (I generally think highly of the actor, but an American doing a British accent while playing a Russian is a distraction; he also appears more aloof than usual), the picture's last third is a disaster, trying to mash together a large portion of the novel by Martin Cruz Smith and pinning the entire mess on an American businessman (Lee Marvin) and some sort of business with sables (expensive weasels). Actually, to be fair, it was never exactly sound from the beginning - or at least I was never sold on the set-up (why didn't the KGB just ... clean it up ahead of time?).
