Good movie but grossly overrated

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A scientist working for a large drug company is on a research project in the Amazon jungle. He sends for a research assistant because he's close to a cure for cancer. When the assistant turns out to be a woman, he rejects her help. Meanwhile the bulldozers get closer to the area in which they are conducting research, and they eventually learn to work together, and enjoy some illicit caffeine....Its one of those movies i was always curious about when first released.Mctiernan is a wonderful director, despite some minor blips, and Connery is a legend. Plus you had the added bonus of Bracco, coming off an amazing performance in Goodfellas. It had to work....Well the cinematography is good, and not much else really. The makers of the film are trying to pass a message across to the viewers like 'love your planet', but did they have to make it so boring?The film consists of the old trope of two people hating each other to begin with, then tolerating each other, before the inevitable. All while we have the little sub plot of the cure for Cancer.It goes nowhere, and despite the two leads doing well, and some beautiful scenery, its a chore to get through.And this is from the maker of the greatest movie ever made as well...

Scientist as good as this guy, which is top 10 in the discovery business, understands that ants make acid type proteins and flowers make alkaloids (mostly, with fruits the major exception). They look different to people like me. When I paused the movie at the structure, it showed an insect type component, not a plant alkaloid (bee sting poison versus cocaine). The structure would have been enough for the scientist in the first place, you don't need the actual compound. You just take something close and modify it, ie taxol from needles instead of bark. I hate being one of the few that noticed this. Lots of pharm companies have these guys out there. That is why drugs are so expensive!

All I could think about while watching this hot mess was the review I was going to write about it. In no particular order, you've got: Lorraine Bracco running around the Amazon in mom jeans, screaming like a banshee (of course she and Sean Connery scream at each other from the first time they meet; that's how we know they will fall in love and get married at the end of the movie); Sean Connery is is eccentric--how do we know? He's got a ponytail. Cool! Weird lively Caribbean music playing in the background, to illustrate the movie is taking place in the Amazon rain forest, I guess. Well, heck, if there's a story beyond that it was lost on me. For every time a woman in a movie screams, "Whoa. . .whoa! Whoa!!!", I knock a star off. If that's the best dialogue the writers can come up with, I don't hold out a lot of hope that the movie is going to improve along the way.

"Life is so strange, but here it seems so precious". That's Bracco's last line (or one of them), a very "deep" and "touching" line - but it's in VERY stark contrast to what she thought about the Rainforest during the shooting of this film. Apparently, everyone in the cast and crew, including Connery, hated filming there. You know, the usual LESS romantic aspects of the Amazon, like mosquitoes, the incessant noise, the heat, bad food, crappy accommodations, various creepy-crawlies etc.Hollywood truly is a bull***t factory, and this movie is no exception. Don't get me wrong, Bracco and Connery are charismatic enough to ensure this to be quite pleasant viewing, but watching Connery fight against lumber-company bulldozers in the middle of the night like some aged James Bondian scientist, was too much even for Tinseltown. It just screamed "cheese" to me."BIG LUMBER CORPORATION NEARLY DESTROYS ALL HOPE FOR A CURE FOR CANCER".That's the kind of headline that the writers of this preachy nonsense would like to imagine, but they don't live in the real world so they can only put it on screen for gullible, uninformed viewers to hopefully (from their left-wing perspective) believe.Flowers... ants... you just need to bend down to tie your shoe-laces in the Amazon Rainforest and you'll stumble upon a cure for cancer, AIDS, leukemia, schizophrenia, the bubonic plague, you name it. Of course, even the Amazon doesn't have a cure for a liberals' naivety. And there's no cure for the stupidity of believing that a bunch of flowers, ants, frogs and trees all hold magical cures for most of mankind's physical ills.Yes, it's wrong and dangerous to cut down the Rainforest indiscriminately. However, let's not get all dramatic and weepy and exaggerate the relevance of the flora and fauna there.I'd like to know why various directors insisted on Connery wearing those god-awful long-hair wigs in his later movies. "The Rock" also comes to mind. What's the point? He just look silly.As for Bracco, she's gorgeous. Had the movie been made today, it would have stunk, because Cameron Diaz would have played Dr."Bronx", and Tom Hanks would have been the scientist. I think I wanna vomit...