Review of Marathon Man (1976) by Rameshwar N — 11 Nov 2012

Marathon Man never quite could elevate itself than your average pot boiler type thriller despite the excellent performances and able direction. Though it tries to be secretive, compartmentalizing and strategically letting in on information to the viewers, I could not find it intriguing enough to sit on the edge. The cloak and dagger stuff is predictable and poorly executed and the scenes inserted to just get the screenplay and plot moving are laughable.

Doc (Roy Scheider) is a Government operative in pursuit of some diamonds stashed by a Nazi War criminal Szell (Laurence Olivier) dubbed the White Angel. Babe (Dustin Hoffman) is a history student and a younger brother to Doc, he is also practicing to participate in a full marathon and meets a beautiful girl of foreign origin Elsa (Marthe Keller). One day Doc falls into Babe's doorstep with a stab wound and succumbs before he tells anything. Babe is then abducted, tortured and pursued to spit out what Doc has revealed in his final moments.

A scene in the first 15 minutes where two old men has a road rage is one of the worst scenes I have come across. The entire story runs on the paranoia of Szell regarding the safety of his diamonds and the way they came up for portraying it is by Szell saying he is paranoid about the safety of his diamonds. Occasionally it gets loud and irrational (large help from Hoffman's character) and I never made me bothered to feel what is going to come next. The character Elsa does not do enough justification considering the screen time. Scheider gives a calculated and reliable performance while Hoffman is inconsistent. The scene of Szell walking by the Jewish market was effective but could have raised the pulse had it been longer or if could have been the climax. The climax was very badly done depicting a cheap B-movie.

Bloated runtime, missing intrigue blows the cover.