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Starring Harrison Ford, John Mahoney. If Harrison Ford has a fault, his critics maintain it is his inability to be recognized as a serious actor. That's if he has any faults. Throughout the Indiana Jones and Star Wars trilogies, and twice as Jack Ryan, Ford has only had to displa.html>spla.html>spla.html>spla.html>splay exuberance, "Hey! I just kicked Darth Vader's ass", remorse, "I should have waited 20 years to properly excavate this archaelogical site, but instead I just grabbed a golden head without measuring anything", and occasionally anger, "leave my family alone". Their point is that any given person on the street could adequately express these very basic emotions as well. In Frantic, Ford lines things up and put those assertions to rest. Playing an American doctor in Paris, Ford stars as Dr. Richard Walker. Walker and his wife check into their hotel, and before they can order escargot, frog legs, the gall bladder of an eel, or rent the automobile equivalent of a can of sardines, Mrs. Walker has disappeared. The only information Ford has to work off of is that his wife mistakenly took someone else's suitcase at the Parisian airport. Ford slowly begins to gather information about the whereabouts of his wife from hotel employees and from items inside the strange suitcase. What made this film so particularly enjoyable was the fact that when Ford's wife disappears, we are just as lost and confused as Ford is. When he dumps the contents of the strange suitcase onto his hotel room floor, we are both wildly looking for something, anything, that would help explain what happened to Mrs. Walker. Like Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade, we know that there is something extremely valuable in the suitcase, it is just of matter of finding out what it is. Frantic's script, penned by Gerard Brach and director Roman Polanski, is pleasantly unassuming and tight. I give credit to Polanski--after his little incident in the '70's a roamin' Polanski--for keeping certain dead ends and investigative failures in the final cut of this film. Too often, directors decide to eliminate anything that is unnecessary to the end product, but that was not the case with Polanski in Frantic. There are several times where Ford will take a bit of information or a theory as far as that path can take him, before returning to his hotel to think of a new avenue to pursue. Frantic is one of those rare Harrison ford films that the majority of people just aren't familiar with. It was made after Solo films, between Jones films, and before Ryan films and movies about the president of the United States throwing terrorists off an airplane at 30,000 feet. However, in it's own right, Frantic stands eye to eye with Ford's more well-known work like Star Wars and The Fugitive. Of the two Mix Up at the Airport movies, Frantic is definitively better than Wait Until Dark. See this one.
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