`Medicine Man` is a sympathetic project that gets done in by an excessively aggressive screenplay-one that keeps manufacturing artificial conflicts and false climaxes where some more relaxed character work would have gracefully done the trick.
With an expansive Sean Connery in the lead as a doctor searching for a cancer cure in an Amazon rain forest and Lorraine Bracco as the foundation scientist sent to check up on him, ”Medicine Man” seems to be setting the stage for a classical Hollywood romantic adventure-aging boy meets brainy girl and woos her in front of an impressively exotic background.
Unfortunately, the script by Tom Schulman (”Dead Poets Society”) and Sally Robinson gets off on the wrong foot by deciding to make Bracco`s character, Dr. Rae Crane, an abrasive feminist who must be relentlessly mocked and humilated into becoming more compliant and thus more ”human.”
Director John McTiernan, who up until now has specialized in smoothly engineered action films (”Predator,” ”Die Hard,” ”The Hunt for Red October”), doesn`t help matters by emphasizing Bracco`s hoarse New York accent (”Bronx” is Connery`s nickname for her) and filming her in unflattering states of undress.
Though Bracco eventually earns the audience`s sympathy, it`s only by standing up to the nearly unbroken stream of abuse to which the film subjects her, including a soaking every few minutes and a couple of sloppy drunk scenes.
Meanwhile, Connery`s Dr. Robert Campbell is desperately trying to recreate the magic cancer-curing serum that has been given him by a local medicine man. He believes it to be made from the petals of a treetop flower, but each time he synthezises the compound, a mysterious, crucial ingredient is missing.
That`s probably enough plot for a couple of movies, but the too-generous writers have also mixed in Connery`s crippling guilt feelings over the flu bug he fatally introduced to an Indian village, Bracco`s upper-crust fiance waiting back in San Francisco, a Brazilian road crew rapidly converging on Connery`s village and threatening to chop down the flower-bearing trees, and a small boy whose suddenly developed tumor will require the last remaining drops of the original serum.
All of these developments are meant to raise the stakes for the obligatory and, as it turns out, rather non-sensical action finale, but all they accomplish is to give the film a false, mechanical feel by filling it with the kind of cheap, manipulative devices that are taught in screenwriting how-to books.
McTiernan achieves some nice effects in those rare moments when the movie stops to smell the flowers and look around at the spectacular landscape (most of the movie was actually shot in Mexico). There`s some lovely stuff when Connery and Bracco go sailing through the treetops on the cable rigging the doctor has set up to harvest his plants. The sequence discreetly evokes the vine-swinging of the Tarzan films, which are not so far away from the kind of exotic, innocent, Garden of Eden romance this movie is trying to promote.
It`s just too bad that the principles don`t like each other sooner and a little bit more.
`MEDICINE MAN`
(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by John McTiernan; written by Tom Schulman and Sally Robinson;
photographed by Donald McAlpine; production designed by John Krenz Reinhart Jr.; edited by Michael R. Miller; music by Jerry Goldsmith; produced by Andrew G. Vajna and Donna Dubrow. A Hollywood Pictures release; opens Friday at the Esquire, Pipers Alley and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:44. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Dr. Robert Campbell…………………Sean Connery
Dr. Rae Crane……………………Lorraine Bracco
Dr. Miguel Ornega……………………Jose Wilker
Tanaki……………………..Rodolfo de Alexandre
Jahausa……………Francisco Tsirene Tsere Rereme
