SummaryDuring a routine exercise, a team of National Guards are threatened by angry and violent locals.
Directed By:Walter Hill
Written By:Michael Kane, Walter Hill, David Giler
Southern Comfort
Metascore
Generally Favorable
63
User score
Generally Favorable
6.4
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Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
63
60% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
40% Mixed
6 Reviews
6 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
100
It's an allegory about the Vietnam war, a study of American character and a national propensity for violence. Southern Comfort is a masterpiece.
80
Beyond its genre roots and its deeper meanings, Southern Comfort is a well-honed study of characters and setting.
75
Southern Comfort is a film of drum-tight professionalism. It is also, unfortunately, so committed to its allegorical vision that it never really comes alive as a story about people.
70
Pic is most exciting as a visual experience, as Walter Hill once again proves himself a consummate filmmaker with a great talent for mood, composition and action choreography.
60
Walter Hill has a dazzling competence as an action director; he uses the locale for its paranoia-inducing strangeness (it suggests Vietnam), and he uses the men to demonstrate what he thinks it takes to survive. Its limitation is that there's nothing underneath the characters' macho masks.
50
The specifics of Hill's movie - and despite its straining for universality, it is all specifics - come approximately a decade too late; in the wake of Who'll Stop the Rain and Apocalypse Now (and even that great B-movie anti-war movie, The Big Red One), it sinks like an insignificant stone. [24 Oct 1981]
40
Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.
User score
Generally Favorable
6.4
47% Positive
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
47% Mixed
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
6% Negative
1 Rating
1 Rating
Mar 1, 2024
8
Very well crafted. Some of the acting is a bit slipshod but Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine have charisma and talent for days. This is a solid film from the great Walter Hill
Jan 16, 2020
7
I really like Keith Carradine (The Duellists is his best and my all time favorite movie but he's most famous for Dexter). Powers Boothe is always good as a guy who is disgusted by his company, an engineer around rednecks is good. Walter Hill was peaking out here, just did The Warriors, on his way to 48 hrs. Cajun music to good effect. i did feel that wanting to finish a play mission after a real death is a big plot hole. They also were in a big hurry to replicate Vietnam too much, it was a template for Platoon also. All in all I would have liked if the rest of the squad died earlier and left Boothe and Carradine in Cajun party longer.
