MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Medicine Man’: In Search of a Dose of Reality

The destruction of the Amazon rain forests has become such a key symbol of waste in our time--with vast tracts of centuries-old jungle chopped up every day--that there seems something defiantly shallow about the premise of “Medicine Man” (citywide). In this majestically shot romance, it’s suggested that it’s a crime to destroy the forests because some of their plants may contain a cure for cancer.

Come again? Not even actors like Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco can shoot conviction into that thinking. It’s a matter of not seeing the forest for the tree--or perhaps the twig--and it misses the lyrical qualities that made a powerful fable of “The Emerald Forest.”

But the movie certainly looks good. Director John McTiernan loves jungles--as he already proved in the witless but stunningly shot Arnold Schwarzenegger hit, “Predator”--and he and cinematographer Donald McAlpine make a gorgeous prowl through the Mexican landscapes. There’s an exploratory, voyeuristic feel about McTiernan’s gliding camera. His eye-level Panavision shots look like Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” might have if Roman Polanski had directed it.

The movie’s star and executive producer, Sean Connery, remains a genuinely magnetic presence. Here, playing a shaggy scientist who prowls around in shorts and a gray ponytail, and soars through the trees in a magical network of hoists and pullies, he’s a heroic eccentric, a Ginger Man turned Tarzan. Connery’s Dr. Robert Campbell is both a scientist and artist--he sketches the others in free moments--and his name may be an echo of Dr. Joseph Campbell, whose “Hero with a Thousand Faces” was used to justify dozens of ridiculous adventure movies in the post-”Star Wars” era. Luckily, Connery is the Hero with a Single Face: craggily benign, roguishly crinkled, Scotch and wry.

Director McTiernan made a genuine high-tech ‘80s pop classic in the first “Die Hard,” the best of all the one-against-a-bunch super-thrillers. But in his follow-up, “The Hunt for Red October” (with Connery as the defecting sub commander), he was straining for large themes and social significance--and trying to find either in a Tom Clancy novel is like trying to pull a rabbit out of a thimble. Now, he’s making an unabashed social message drama with a writer, Tom Schulman, whose last two scripts were an Oscar-winner (“Dead Poets Society”) and a fantasy mega-hit (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”), but whose writing here seems almost hermetically uninventive.

The social drama doesn’t work well and neither does the romance. Much of the movie dwells on strained conflict-comedy scenes between Connery’s Campbell and Bracco as Rae Crane. In a way, Rae acts as Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe to Campbell’s Kurtz, but instead of a Heart of Darkness, she finds a Heart of Sweetness. And Bracco has been shortchanged: Her part is a Bronx shrieker, another screechy dame in the jungle, almost like Kate Capshaw in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

The movie is best when it sails off into pure nutty adventure--Connery rescuing Bracco in a perilous cliffhanger or their tryst in the tree-pulleys. Otherwise, the two doctors bicker and ogle each other, ruminating desperately over the beakers of serum and computers, before bulldozers bury everything. The local natives are all played by actual Brazilian Indians, but they’re treated so peripherally that the movie actually puts their broken English into subtitles--and when they translate from other tribal language, it subtitles their translations.

Are movies like this the inevitable result when filmmakers who’ve mastered the style and punch for over-the-top action movies try to do something poetic and meaningful? Perhaps not. There are nice things in “Medicine Man” (MPAA-rated PG-13) but it only works perfectly when it leaves its characters up a tree.

‘Medicine Man’

Sean Connery: Dr. Robert Campbell

Lorraine Bracco: Dr. Rae Crane

Jose Wilker: Dr. Dr. Miguel Ornega

Rodolfo De Alexandre: Tanaki

An Andrew Vajna presentation of a Hollywood Pictures production, released by Buena Vista Pictures. Director John McTiernan. Producers Andrew Vajna, Donna Dubrow. Executive producer Connery. Screenplay by Tom Schulman, Sally Robinson. Cinematographer Donald McAlpine. Editor Michael R. Miller. Costumes Marilyn Vance-Straker. Music Jerry Goldsmith. Production design John Krenz Reinhart, Jr. Art directors Don Diers, Jesus Buenrostro. Running time: 1 hour,44 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (Language).