GazerRise Fantastic!

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Robert J. Maxwell A sometimes amusing tale of four or five small-time horse thieves in Montana. The movement of horses across the wide high plains is getting a bit dicey so the inexperienced gang holds up a train in a comic scene in order to buy a small farm in which they plan to stash their stolen herds until market time. Something like that.Jack Nicholson is one of the gang. As the gang repairs the farm just to make it look functional, Nicholson finds that he rather LIKES planting all those cabbages and pruning the apple trees in the orchard. He's beginning to put down as many roots as his carrots. The rest of the clumsy gang carry on their nefarious trade.Meanwhile, an important local rancher named Braxton sees his horses stolen and, soon enough, his nymphomaniacal daughter begins taking up with Nicholson. This irritates Braxton, and he hires Marlon Brando as a "regulator", that is, a private law enforcement gun for hire whose specialty is exploding people's heads at a distance with a high-powered rifle. Brando disposes of the gang one by one, even after Braxton fires him, and there is a final confrontation between him and Nicholson.The best thing about the movie -- or the worst thing, depending on your taste -- is Marlon Brando's performance. It exceeds the unpredictable and reaches for the bizarre. He wears outlandish costumes, switches from one phony accent to another without adumbration.Sometimes I had the feeling that the director, Arthur Penn, simply let the camera roll while Brando improvised lines and bits of business. One of the most singular scenes has Brando alone with two horses in the wilderness. He converses with the two horses. He allows one to nibble its way up the carrot that he, Brando, holds in his mouth. "You have the eyes of Cleopatra," he murmurs lovingly. He holds a carrot out to the other animal and then slaps its cheek when it tries to bite the carrot. "That's faw yaw deceit and treachery," he scolds, using a high-flown English accent adopted from the Fletcher Christian character from "Mutiny on the Bounty." I don't know whether Brando was enjoying himself or not but I was laughing like hell. He trumpets his own idiosyncrasy earlier, a legend in his own bathtime. These entire scenes, like a few others, are utterly absurd.Nicholson is likable but it's not one of his more memorable performances. He seems to be one of those actors -- Paul Newman is another -- who is at his best when he gets the right role but otherwise slips into a default delivery. The girl with whom Nicholson winds up is attractive enough but sounds as if she'd just graduated from Smith College. The supporting cast is made up mostly of stalwarts who put in a professional effort.On the whole, you know what it looks like in its structure? "Bonny and Clyde", except that the despised forces of law and order are not dispersed among small-town coppers but are instead concentrated in the persona of Brando, the villainous murderer, and the embittered rancher who has hired him.

Michael_Elliott Missouri Breaks, The (1976) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Somewhat notorious Western about a group of horse thieves (led by Jack Nicholson) who are stalking a rich owner who grows tired of them so he hires a "regulator" (Marlon Brando) to track them down and kill them. THE MISSOURI BREAKS was released to some incredibly negative reviews and even today many people consider this one of the worst movies ever made. I certainly wouldn't go that far as there are many entertaining moments to be had here but when you consider Brando was coming off THE GODFATHER and LAST TANGO IN Paris and Nicholson was coming off ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, one can't help but wish that the film had been much better. At its core this is just another film with the message that the "bad" guys usually aren't nearly as cruel or evil as the so-called "good" guys that are paid to go after them. This film really is a complete mess because it's never quite clear what director Arthur Penn is wanting to go for. At times this seems just like a comedy. At other times it features some graphic violence and dark tones. It's never quite clear what to make of the character played by Brando because he's just so weird that it's hard to be scared of him and he's too campy to really take too serious. As for Brando, God love him because we get the type of over-the-top and outrageous performance that only a genius could deliver. I wouldn't dare say the performance was great but you really have to give the actor credit for delivery a "performance" unlike anything you've ever seen before. The "free" natured style that Brando brings to the character works fine but if you read anything about the film's production you will learn that the director pretty much gave up on the actor and just let him do whatever he wanted. This will account for the strange clothes, the strange weapons and other strange things that are constantly going on with the performance. It's so outrageous and strange that you can't help but be entertained by it but at the same time it's tone is certainly going against everything else in the film. Nicholson is pretty much by-the-numbers but he's at least entertaining and it's fun seeing the two actors working together even if it's obvious that many of their scenes together were shot at different times. Kathleen Lloyd makes for a good love interest and we get good performances by Frederic Forrest, Randy Quaid and Harry Dean Stanton. The "story" itself really isn't anything we haven't already seen countless times and one of the biggest problems is that the film simply goes on for way too long and it's clear at times that it doesn't seem to know where it wants to go. With that said, if you've heard that the film is among one of the worst ever made that's just simply not true. With Brando and Nicholson together you'd hope for a masterpiece but we didn't get that. Instead we just got a rather strange Western with a really strange and unique performance by Brando.

Mickey Micklon A group of outlaws, lead by "Tom Logan" (Jack Nicholson), settles into a Missouri ranch to hideout from the law. However, a powerful rancher hires a man (Marlon Brando) to run them out.The "regulator" (Brando) wipes out the entire band of outlaws, but "Tom," who decides to go straight in his pursuit of a local woman (Kathleen Lloyd).Now, the two are heading to a face-off that may be each other's last day on Earth.This is not the best movie I've seen. In fact, I noticed myself looking away from my computer screen (I watched it on Hulu) many times.I found the characters poorly written, although they were pretty well performed by the actors. They were all pretty one-dimensional, and they just didn't seem to connect with each other.The relationships between the characters just didn't work. I could not feel anything in the romantic subplot at all. In fact, I couldn't feel any chemistry between Nicholson and Lloyd at all.There was a little chemistry between Nicholson and Brando. But, because of the poor writing, they really had little to work with for their on-screen relationship.Surprisingly, the gunplay was minimal. Even when you expected a good amount of shooting, it wasn't there. There is some violence, though it's fairly mild. In the first minute of the movie, there is a fairly graphic hanging that was probably placed that early in the film for shock value.The scenery was used pretty well in this movie. It certainly wasn't overplayed. There were some scenes where the scenery was used quite well with camera angles and such.John Williams did, in my opinion, a poor job in writing the music for this film. To me, the music was more modern instrumental work, and just didn't work. In fact, despite being composed by a Hollywood legend like Williams, the soundtrack is completely forgettable.Wardrobe appeared to be authentic in this film, except the outfit Brando wore through much of the film. His outfit was a little over-the-top, but not too much to be distracting.I would have to say that if you find it online on sites like Hulu, check it out if you have nothing better to do. Other than that, don't waste your money.

FightingWesterner Fun-loving criminal Jack Nicholson attempts to keep a low-profile by buying a ranch in order to launder stolen livestock. However, he begins to reconsider his thieving ways when he begins to romance the daughter of a local rancher. Soon he finds himself and his gang targeted by Marlon Brando, a very eccentric and very lethal hired gun.Though not as bad as some prominent critics would have you believe, nor as brilliant as others insist, this once in a lifetime pairing of Nicholson and Brando is a little bit disappointing.They're both pretty amusing (especially Brando), but don't really have much to do, at least until the final fifty-minutes or so when Brando gets busy. These two simply should have thrown off more sparks than they did!Still, this tongue-in-cheek, offbeat western has it's moments, just not as many as director Arthur Penn's Little Big Man.There's some good support from Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton, Frederick Forrest, and John P. Ryan, as Nicholson's gang.