The Boys from Brazil (1978)

(TubiTV Streaming, December 2022) The biggest challenge of The Boys from Brazil is the inherent craziness of its gradually revealed premise. (It’s technically a spoiler, but most people who approach the film will know about it in the first place, and the script dawdles so long around its mystery that most viewers will guess it long before it finally puts its cards on the table.)  In a few words, the film’s believability will hinge on whether you think that genetic clones of Hitler can, given environmental stressors, become a global threat. In its glum late-1970s sheen, The Boys From Brazil laboriously unveils its plot—a dastardly cloning experiment that resulted in dozens of boys being adopted around the world by couples of very exact psychology and occupations, then a concerted effort to assassinate the adoptive fathers in order to induce the same stressors that resulted in… wait for it… HITLER. Just ignore the art-school thing (unless they were planning on flunking him out), ignore the World War I thing (unless they were planning on re-creating that) and the Weimar Republic thing (unless they were planning on re-creating that… at which point, wait, how ridiculous is that premise?)  But fear not—both the original novel and the screenplay dip into The Omen territory by making sure we understand that the teen Hitler-clones are already budding serial killers. This is really not a movie where you should second-guess the premise, because it just gets funnier and dumber the more you think about it. Alas, what could have been salvaged in execution or periodic plot thrills simply falls flat as the film unspools: a languid pacing that takes forever to get anywhere is an issue, as are the decidedly unexciting sequences along the way. But the time the film gets to a fight, it has forgotten that its protagonist and antagonist alike (later-career Gregory Peck and Laurence Oliver) are geriatric retirement-home candidates who look more ridiculous than anything else when exchanging fisticuffs in a living room. After watching the film, you will wonder in vain if anything about the film isn’t fit to be ridiculed. Director Franklin J. Schaffner’s attempts to present a respectable prestige film out that tissue of nonsense is admirable but becomes increasingly funnier as it goes on. I’m not saying that the film is uninteresting—simply taking a look at the cast, which also include James Mason and a very young Steve Guttenberg (plus irony points for an equally young Bruno Ganz not playing Hitler), would be enough. And, of course, trying to figure out the myriad ways in which the same building blocks could have been rearranged into something far more interesting. But in its current form, The Boys From Brazil feels more like inept comedy than successful thriller and that’s even truer in the twenty-first century than at a time when Mengeles was still alive.