Entitled CURACAO when it aired on Showtime cable in 1993, and renamed for home video release, this ambitious but elaborately silly potboiler derives a modicum of tone from the venerable presence of George C. Scott.
Ex-CIA asset Stephen Guerin (William Petersen) is collecting a pension in Curacao, where he's been banished for killing a rogue agent who once betrayed him in Cuba. Reduced to de facto honorary consul in this Caribbean backwater, Guerin has one friend--colorful tavern-keeper Cornelius Wettering
(Scott), a grizzled Brit with a Hemingway beard. When Indonesian terrorists attempt a daring midday bank robbery in the town square, bystander Wettering overpowers one of them and liberates the hostages. He's an instant hero, and his photograph is published around the globe, exposing a buried
past. Years before, while running guns to South Africa in defiance of a U.N. embargo, Wettering connived with some Chinese warlords to sink his freighter in an insurance scam, but he was misled about the power of the explosives used. Thirty crew members were killed, and Wettering disappeared,
having saved the ship's log and cargo manifest as an insurance policy against the inevitable day his past would return to haunt him.
Soon, vengeful Chinese gangsters--the Hsung Brothers--show up in Curacao, as does South African intelligence agent Seemuller (Alexei Sayle), who wants to extradite Wettering for trial. When Wettering's "son" (later to be revealed as his gay lover) is murdered, the old man apparently drowns
himself in the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean. Seemuller, meanwhile, recruits Guerin for the South African secret police; the CIA advises Guerin to enlist as a double agent, sending the message via his former lover Julia (Julie Carmen), a Cuban secret agent. Guerin finds the ship's papers
and offers to sell them to the Hsung Brothers, who inform him that Seemuller was the original mastermind of the insurance fraud. Guerin manages to manipulate the Hsungs and Seemuller into killing each other, sends Julia back to decline the CIA's invitation, and locates Wettering in hiding--he's
now gone native, like Col. Kurtz upriver, and Guerin promises to preserve his secret.
Produced by relative heavyweight Art Levinson (MY FAVORITE YEAR, THE MONEY PIT) and directed by Australian journeyman Carl Schultz, the film carries a rich travelogue texture, which is abetted decisively by the exotic locale. However, despite some Graham Greene-esque ambitions (reinforced by a
muted, burnished look), the film constantly teeters on the brink of unintentional camp, toppling over once and for all at the moment when George C. Scott intones: "He wasn't my son. He was my ... fancy boy." (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment
