Memorable, crazy movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I read that Leone only made "Duck, You Sucker" because he couldn't make what he really wanted to do ("Once Upon a Time in America") due to various issues with funding and rights to the material. I don't think his heart was really in this one. The film lacks the careful craftsmanship that his other films have. Perhaps there is a diamond in here somewhere, something that others are seeing, but it wasn't polished enough to be clear to me. The best Leone films are very deliberate. Almost nothing is wasted, every shot and scene has a purpose and every shot looks like a professional photograph. I cannot say the same about "Duck, You Sucker." The filmmaking here seems a bit tired. A lot of effort was obviously put into special effects and explosions, and I think that dragged down the rest. Call it the "George Lucas Effect." I had no idea Leone pioneered that too. What makes the other Sergio Leone films special to me is that they are in many ways "films about films." They offer a stylized look into American culture from a very European perspective. If that's present here in "Duck, you Sucker," it went over my head.

"Duck, You Sucker" is a Leone movie and I freely admit that I was expecting something akin to the Dollars Trilogy (both of them came packaged in the Sergio Leone Anthology, so it's not too big a stretch). Which is nowhere near the case, and that suits me just fine. But it is bogged down by a solemn vibe, and even though revolvers are (mostly) traded in for explosions, you start to miss the larger-than-life presences of van Cleef, Eastwood and Wallach after awhile. I was on board with the revolutionary politics of the thing, but the pacing is all off.I do like Rod Steiger and James Coburn, both wielding iffy accents (although Steiger seems a bit more at home with his). And there were moments of great poignancy, particularly in the cave and the final scene. Between the pacing, the uneven tone and Morricone's score (very "Butch Cassidy"), it's not my favorite. But there's chemistry between the two leads.6/10

While not being at all my favourite Sergio Leone film, I still believe this movie is one of those you should have seen to consider yourself a proper cinephile. "Duck, you sucker" starts with a guy peeing, something kind of strange in a western film. In fact, the first scene that comes after that introduces very well and seriously one of the biggest themes in the movie, the discrimination of the poor and the Mexican revolution. Then we have the encounter between the two main characters, and a whole alteration of really silly, humorous and childish moments to very serious scenes and events. This film depicts violence of the Mexican dictatorship as crudely as many films depict Nazis. Homever, it also shows an aspect of revolutions not always obvious. As Mao-Tze tung'squote says at the beginning, "Revolution is an act of violence". The film, through the experiences of John as an I.R.A. terrorist shown in flashbacks, paralleling events in the film, how inglorious and dirty were actually the really hosannated revolutions, making the viewer feel at the end similarly to John, who says at a point in the film, "I don't believe in anything but dynamite." This movie though is not anti-revolutionary or justifies dictatorships. "Duck you sucker" has a quite complex theme and seriousness, next to some really silly and childish situations or jokes, and an unmemorable score which are what make the movie fall down to mark 8/10. Every Sergio Leone fan should try to understand it homever.

Junk.Sergio Leone was an acquired taste--his "Dollar Trilogy" runs the gamut from lean/lyrical to surreal/stupefying. Leone comes a cropper with his elephantine "A Fistful of Dynamite," a low-brid combination of political revolution, infantile plotting, and dreadful performances.Although "Duck You Sucker" (the alternate title) tries to be a message film, all we get is incoherence, with buckets of blood and one of the weirder musical scores I've heard. Rod Steiger and James Coburn are trapped in bad make-up and/or bad accents as they slaughter and butcher and incinerate roughly a third of the Mexican Army in the 1910 Revolution. I kept hoping, during what seemed to be a week of movie watching, that some of the old surrealistic, alternate-universe, western magic would appear. All I got for my effort of watching A Fistful of Dynamite was a weak headache, and I felt sad for Sergio Leone because, although he wasn't a great director, he had a knack for big storytelling.And that knack wasn't apparent in this incomprehensible and artsy- fartsy bloodbath.