Попутчик (англ. The Hitcher) Американский кинофильм 1986 года, снятый Робертом Хармоном с участием Рутгера Хауэра

Попутчик (англ. The Hitcher) Американский кинофильм 1986 года, снятый Робертом Хармоном по сценарию Эрика Реда, с участием Рутгера Хауэра, Си Томаса Хауэлла, Джеффри ДеМанна и Дженнифер Джейсон Ли. В 2003 году вышло продолжение с Джейком Бьюзи в главной роли, а в 2007 году был снят ремейк с участием Шона Бина в роли попутчика. Contractually, TriStar Pictures was obligated to distribute any film by HBO/Silver Screen. TriStar representatives saw an early screening and studio president David Matalon said, “It’s the best film that we have for 1986“. The Hitcher opened in 800 theaters on February 21, 1986, and made $2.1 million during its opening weekend, going on to gross $5.8 million in North America. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Hitcher holds a 62% approval rating based on 37 critic reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The consensus reads: “Its journey is never quite as revelatory as it could be, but The Hitcher stands as a white-knuckle vision of horror, bolstered by Rutger Hauer’s menacing performance“. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 32 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews“. Roger Ebert awarded it no stars, arguing that the identification of the film’s hero with the killer is hollow because the killer has no backstory or even a motive. Gene Siskel also gave the film zero stars, calling it “a nauseating thriller“ and “a thinly veiled but more gruesome ripoff of Steven Spielberg’s Duel“. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin criticized the film’s lack of intensity and originality, and wrote, “Mr. Harmon, making his feature debut, displays a much surer hand for action than for character, though even some of the action footage here looks meaninglessly overblown“. Variety called it “a highly unimaginative slasher ... with a script that has many holes“. In his review for The Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote: “The script (by Eric Red) is laconic in a dull way, much Cain but hardly able. And Harmon and his cinematographer, John Seale, have shot the movie in such brown murk, you can hardly make anything out. By the end, you’re willing to forgive Ryder his worst if someone would just change the light bulb“. In his review for The Globe and Mail, Jay Scott described the film as a “slasher movie about gay panic, a nasty piece of homophobic angst for the age of AIDS“. A rare positive review came from Newsweek magazine’s Jack Kroll who called it, “an odyssey of horror and suspense that’s as tightly wound as a garrote and as beautifully designed as a guillotine“. Leonard Maltin awarded the film a score of 2 1/2 out of 4 stars (his most frequently used rating), criticizing the film’s violence as being “genuinely grisly and unappealing“ while also noting that the film wasn’t without interest. While most reviewers criticized the sadistic nature of the film’s violence in general and Nash’s death in particular, one of the film’s producers said that the film’s commercial failure was because of a lack of violence and that Nash’s death should have been shown: “There’s other gore in the movie, other killings, but this is the main one. It’s the motivation for the hero. You can’t show all the killings we showed and then not show the main one. It’s cheating the audience“. Hauer said critics misunderstood the film. According to him, it is an allegory in which Ryder represents evil. However, Ebert wrote that “I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary. But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible“. Фильм мгновенно стал культовым в СССР, хотя на западе лента на первых порах была встречена достаточно прохладно. Рутгер Хауэр настолько вжился в роль маньяка, что Си Томас Хауэлл даже боялся своего партнёра по съёмочной площадке. Это второй фильм, в котором можно одновременно увидеть и Рутгера Хауэра, и Дженнифер Джейсон Ли. Ранее они вместе снимались в исторической драме «Плоть и кровь».