![]() A diabolical look floods across Ford’s face, and for the briefest of moments, the actor leverages his unimpeachable image for villainous intent. The elixir turns our once all-American hero into an abusive goon. The demonically dressed high priest forces Jones to drink from a skull a hypnotic potion. Jones is held captive in an Indian temple controlled by a bloodthirsty cult. In “ Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” the darkest installment in the franchise, while on a mission to recover a sacred stone stolen from an Indian village, Dr. If audiences were surprised by Ford’s evil turn, they shouldn’t have been because two-and-a-half years earlier he played an even worse person. Ford seems to revel in deconstructing his perfect dad image for villainous effect. He commits these unforgivable errors in the name of his ego. He pollutes the jungle’s once teeming river. ![]() And Ford avoids any possible appeals for us to like his character: Allie allows his family to grow thin and dirty, their clothes tattered. There’s nothing remotely redeemable about Allie. In delivering this line, Ford retrofits his beguiling smile into an all-is-well egocentric smirk. To con his family into staying in the jungle, he tells them America has been decimated by nuclear war. They might as well be prisoners of war, not his children. As punishment, Allie places them in a separate canoe and tows them behind his main boat. Or Allie accuses both Charlie and Jerry of betrayal after the children try to depart in the boat and leave him in the river. The dad vehemently orders the young Jerry to “be a man” when the child wonders aloud where in the jungle they’ll sleep. In other instances, Allie is undeniably mentally abusive to his children. A close-up of Charlie sees him proverbially waking from his father’s influence. Charlie looks horrified upon his dad, who bitterly retorts, “It’s either them or us.” When Fat Boy explodes, a full shot shows Ford emblazoned in hellish red, and his face contorted in pain. And when rebel warriors arrive with guns to establish Jeronimo as their base, in an attempt to freeze them to death, Allie traps the soldiers in Fat Boy. Thereby turning this once dreamlike land into a raging dystopia.ĭue to his enacting several spiteful punishments, his sons turn on him. In fact, Allie demands absolute fealty from his children lest they suffer his wrath. Allie forces his devoted family to continue living in the jungle, even though they’re quickly losing food and shelter. Allie refers to his loyal black friend Mr. ![]() Later, when his plan for an advanced civilization inevitably comes to ruin, the once eccentric yet idealist father turns malicious. Instead, it’s his white man’s burden to revolutionize their culture. He puts the natives into hard labor to tame the land and build his grand invention, a giant ice machine nicknamed “Fat Boy.” Allie’s decision to build a utopia in the jungle isn’t so much derived from a respect for the native’s way of life. Their idyllic vision of Allie is shattered upon arriving in Jeronimo. Heck, Allie is even wearing a Hawaiian shirt on their boat ride. And when they depart their safe country environment to unknown jungles, they treat the journey as though it were a vacation. They and their mother ( Helen Mirren) take Allie’s harangues about the American Dream being shattered by consumerism, religion, and small minds as gospel. Initially, Allie’s two sons-Charlie ( River Phoenix) and Jerry (Jadrien Steele)-treat their patronizing father as a godlike genius. In Weir's “The Mosquito Coast,” the misunderstood inventor Allie Fox (Ford) uproots his family from their rural American surroundings to establish a utopian civilization in the small Central American village of Jeronimo. Take 1986’s “The Mosquito Coast.” After Ford’s first collaboration with Peter Weir, “ Witness,” where he played an undercover detective hiding a child witness in Amish Country, audiences might have expected more of the same. ![]() “What Lies Beneath” worked not only because of defied expectations but because of how it built on other examples of when Han Solo went bad. But Ford often subverted his on-screen heroic reputation to provoke suspense in other dark, sometimes underrated roles. ![]()
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