A Perfect World

A Perfect World

A Perfect World
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Category: DVD
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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Christopher Reagan Ammons, Darryl Cox, Kevin Costner, Laura Dern, Leo Burmester
Brand: EASTWOOD,CLINT
Primary Contributor: Kevin Costner
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 138 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-10-01
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video

Movie Reviews of A Perfect World

Movie Review: A brief comment
Summary: 4 Stars

Please note that I saw this movie on HBO and so can't speak to the quality of the video transfer.

I saw this movie when it first came out and only just saw it again recently after many years. It held up the second time and it was certainly a pleasure getting to see Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and Laura Dern in the same film. Costner plays an escaped prison inmate, a man who is tortured by his past and his abusive upbringing but who also has no future, as the dragnet slowly tightens its noose. You get a sense from the very beginning that the movie will end tragically in his death, but for now he has a taste of freedom. Eastwood plays the cynical but sedulous Texas Ranger who is determined to bring Costner in, alive if possible. Dern plays the Fed psychologist and profiler who is always getting in Eastwood's face, and their strained relationship provides one of the main sources of tension in the movie. And the young boy, I don't know his name, is really superb as Costner's captive.

Costner, for all his flaws as an adult, understands kids, and the friendship that develops between the boy and Costner's character is the main psychological focus of the film. Despite being on the lam, Costner manages to show the kid at least something of a good time, and how that comes about is one of the charms of the movie, but I won't go into any details so as not to provide any spoilers. Although a commercial failure (perhaps because of Costner being cast against type as a bad guy), the move is certainly an artistic success since the entire cast is truly great in their roles. This might be the least well known of all of Eastwood's films but it's still well worth your time and money.

Summary of A Perfect World

Double Academy Award winners' Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood confront each other from opposite sides of the law in A Perfect World, an acclaimed, multilayered manhunt saga (directed by Eastwood) that rumbles down Texas backroads toward a harrowing collision with fate. Costner plays Butch Haynes, a hardened prison escapee on the lam with a young hostage (T.J. Lowther in a remarkable film debut) who sees in Butch the father figure he never had. Eastwood is wily Texas Ranger Red Garnett, leading deputies and a criminologist (Laura Dern) in a statewide pursuit. Red knows every road and pothole in the Panhandle. What's more, he knows the elusive Haynes-because their paths have crossed before.
This curiously overlooked drama from Clint Eastwood, released just after his Oscar triumph with Unforgiven, concerns a prisoner (Kevin Costner) on the lam with a kidnapped young boy as protection and the Texas Ranger (Eastwood) and federal agent (Laura Dern) on his tail. Eastwood manages a number of nice touches--the boy's innocence is nicely contrasted with Costner's soft-spoken desperado by the Casper Halloween costume he wears, and the law-enforcement officials look vaguely foolish, tooling around the countryside with a high-tech camper in tow. Eastwood gives a grizzled performance that, despite its seen-it-all surface, still feels fresh after all these years, and he coaxes surprisingly sensitive work out of Costner. But it's the sheer, modest scale of this piece that makes it so disarming--no planet lies in jeopardy, there are no cosmic make-or-break consequences here, just committed people doing their job and a well-meaning bad guy hoping things don't get too out of hand while he prevents them from doing it. --David Kronke

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