The River Niger is one of those films I had a lot of Hope for initially. I thought it was going to be a African dramatic story taking place several hundred years before European colonialism with the narration of James Earl Jones.
But instead we get this 1970s American dramatic film peppered in with kind of pointless criminal elements.
To be fair the criminal elements are semi important and do mix in with the more dramatic scenes.
But it just feels like our movie has to put itself on hold so instead of having really intense moments of James Earl Jones and Glynn Turman* arguing with each other as they play a father-son dynamic revolving around military service and the free will of a man to live his own life.
But we have two instead deal with a group of petty criminals who may or may not want to blow up a police station?
It's a whole thing that's revolving around the old black panther movements in the Afrocentric revolutionary ideas. Probably would have made a heck of a lot more sense if it was a 60s film but it's 1976 and at this point those revolutions were kind of on their way out.
The film does kind of frame it as a lost cause idea even our main character tells off this gang of idiots trying such a thing.
But that's all kind of a waste of time as most of the movie doesn't revolve around that.
It's just a bunch of people living in this one house and kind of interacting with each other and every year and their James Earl Jones decides to try and write a bit more poetry mainly based around the River Niger and to give the film credits I do really like these scenes.
It seems the only time James Earl Jones character can really get out the creative juices when something horrible is happening.
Which all culminates in the end when he discovers that his wife has cancer and then he decides to take the blame for the murdering of a cop after a botched bombing explosion leads our Gang of Misfits to James Earl Jones house to try and escape from the cops.
The movie becomes a situational drama in where the police are surrounding the place and planning the storm it. James Earl Jones decides to take responsibility claim that he's the leader of this gang and get everybody else off the hook. Zoom in the little quickly and in reality there's not a chance in hell this whole thing would work out. Everyone in that house would just be screwed.
Overall it's a fairly mundane drama that has a little spikes of brilliance. Anytime you can get our main characters together in a heated debate or anytime you can just get James Earl Jones to get a nice soliloquy.
I mean I know it's a giant stereotype to bring up with the man but he's got the voice of butter at the end of the day and any movie that can utilise it well have something to show off.
I kind of wonder if this film would have been better off as a TV show. There's no way they would have been able to get it most of this past the sensors to make it a TV show in the 70s and it's kind of a shame because it's format would have worked out so much better for it even if it was just a miniseries and only lasted 5 episode.
*It's kind of weird that they want us to have a father-son relationship between Jones and Turman. The guys are only 17 years apart in age. James Earl Jones did look a heck of a lot older. I suspect some of that might be down to make up, thought maybe he was just a naturally older looking guy. It is kind of funny that we're supposed to think Turmen is 25 in the film though. He's supposed to play this young kid.
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