Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
is neutral about it.
At once stupefying and whimsical, unconscionably absurd and yet undeniably enchanting, the legendary
Alejandro Jodorowsky's little-seen British follow-up to his X-rated Mexican horror piece
Santa Sangre (1989) is a kind of baroque, mildly surrealistic, and irreverent slapstick parable about platonic love and friendship between two miscreants -- the dispossessed prince Meleagre (
Peter O'Toole) and his sidekick, the diminutive and chubby thief Dima (
Omar Sharif), who live together in the city sewers. And the overtone of this story? Imagine
Midnight Cowboy, as if rewritten by
Luis Buñuel,
Terry Gilliam, and
Roald Dahl as a madcap comic fairy tale. There are acute traces of Jodorowsky's penchant for anticlericalism and provocation (as when two men are mock-crucified in a carnival act) that became so potent in
El Topo, but here, Jodorowsky reveals a softness of heart that remained conspicuously absent from the earlier works in his oeuvre -- as in the opening scene, when Dima feeds a gentle, slightly anthropomorphized white rat. Gone is Jodorowsky's cruel streak. As is typical for the director, however, he populates his film with social outcasts and freaks -- a towering yet slightly backward and soft-spoken giant; a dwarfish "bug man," dressed all in green, sent into a state of utter panic when Dima steals his Victrola; Kronos the dog, an Afghan-hound puppet given life by Meleagre. One would be hard-pressed to explain the meaning of this piece of arcanum, yet it retains a dotty charm throughout. The film also evolves, inexplicably, into something close to a
Goonies-style adventure in its last third, with set pieces so fantastic that they begin to resemble the high-flown adventures of a preadolescent dream. There are indeed traces of Spielberg and
Chris Columbus in the picture, in addition to Jeunet and Caro, Buñuel, Fellini,
Walt Disney -- even Sir Carol Reed. Even given the heterogeneity of its influences, The Rainbow Thief flows together with astonishing smoothness and dexterity and retains a magical aura throughout. One only wishes the running time were longer -- it feels as if it might have been cut, a likely prospect given the logistical and bureaucratic problems that reputedly plagued Jodorowsky on set. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide