03/04/10 - Mad Dog Morgan

Mad Dog Morgan (1976, 102 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074836/

I return to another Weird Wednesday film after a one week absence. The pick is Mad Dog Morgan, a Australian exploitation movie starring Dustin Hopper.

Dustin Hopper is really the only actor of mention here. He plays Daniel Morgan, a fugitive living on the run in Australia. I guess a secondary character is Billy, played by a real aborigine in David Gulpilil. Billy serves as helper, guide, and assistant to the wild Daniel Morgan. But pretty much everything revolves around the established Hopper.

Overall, the movie does a fairly decent job at making us care for Morgan. Most of the time in these Weird Wednesday movies, they go about showing the character without really making you like them at all. In the end of this film when Morgan died, it did seem somewhat sad, so the film at least got that right. Probably a big factor of this is Hopper's acting. Apparently on too many drugs to even name at the time, Hopper was able to get everything together and pull off an overall solid performance.

One of the big problems with the film though is that it was just way too long. I mentioned above that I somewhat cared for Morgan, but I didn't care enough about him to spend 102 minutes with him. The movie really seemed to think it was much more than it was. I'm not saying it thought it was The Godfather or anything, but it didn't seem to realize perhaps how poor it really was. But maybe this criticism is too harsh. In any event, I think the movie lulled way too much and had too much pointless scenes just thrown in there in an attempt to be a serious and real movie (as opposed to a fun, lighter flick). Because of this I was constantly looking at my watch from boredom - never a good sign.

Really I find myself stretching for much to say here. Most of the scenes were just forgettable for me. Sure, Hopper handled himself well and did a good job (especially given what he had), but I can't really even recall many aspects of the film worth mention. There were some flashes of quality filming in occasional stretches of like 15 minutes here and there, but there was much more bad than good.

Overall, I gave this film a 3/10. Hopper somehow gives a good performance here and there's some adequate character development during certain segments. On the negative side there's a way too long run time from a film that takes itself way too seriously. These negatives really detract from the end result for me.