The Mosquito Coast

    The Mosquito Coast
    1986

    Synopsis

    Allie Fox, an American inventor exhausted by the perceived danger and degradation of modern society, decides to escape with his wife and children to Belize. In the jungle, he tries with mad determination to create a utopian community with disastrous results.

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    Cast

    • Harrison FordAllie Fox
    • Helen MirrenMother Fox
    • River PhoenixCharlie Fox
    • Conrad RobertsMr. Haddy
    • Martha PlimptonEmily Spellgood
    • Andre GregoryReverend Spellgood
    • Dick O'NeillMr. Polski
    • Jadrien SteeleJerry Fox
    • Michael RogersFrancis Lungley
    • Hilary GordonApril Fox

    Recommendations

    • 88

      TV Guide Magazine

      A courageous and serious film that explores the limits of the mythic American virtues of persistence, inventiveness, and rugged individualism.
    • 80

      Los Angeles Times

      Weir's orchestrated The Mosquito Coast's action to match Fox's progressive mental state, from rage to explosion to squalls and finally to hurricane velocity; however, the film leaves us not with an apotheosis, but exhaustion. [26 Nov 1986]
    • 70

      Variety

      It is hard to believe that a film as beautiful as The Mosquito Coast [adapted from the novel by Paul Theroux] can also be so bleak, but therein lies its power and undoing.
    • 70

      Washington Post

      The Mosquito Coast is the only movie you'll see this season that has too much ambition for its own good - its subject, really, is nothing less than the American experience.
    • 50

      Chicago Reader

      Peter Weir's 1986 adaptation of Paul Theroux's best-selling novel is literally that - an adaptation without much character of its own.
    • 50

      Chicago Sun-Times

      The movie has been directed and acted so well, in fact, that almost all my questions have to do with the script: Why was the hero made so uncompromisingly hateful?
    • 50

      Christian Science Monitor

      What keeps The Mosquito Coast from being a great movie is too much caution.
    • 50

      The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

      The Mosquito Coast is a work of consummate craftsmanship and it's spectacularly acted, down to the smallest roles (Martha Plimpton as a classically obstreperous preacher's daughter, for example), but its field of vision is as narrow and eventually as claustrophobic as Allie's. [28 Nov 1986]

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