Southern Comfort

In 1973, members of the Louisiana National Guard venture into the bayou for training exercises. It isn’t long before they offend some local Cajun hunters, with tragic consequences. Lost, scared and conflicted, the guardsmen are then left to fight their way back to civilization.

The worst that can be said for Southern Comfort is that it is low on originality. The plot mirrors that of one of director Walter Hill’s previous films, The Warriors, in which a more urban group of outnumbered outsiders tried to fight their way home. The ruthlessness of the locals and Mother Nature alike also suggest a strong indebtedness to Deliverance. In fact, if some studio executive pitched Deliverance meets Tropic Thunder meets Predator, this is probably the product that would result.

It’s filmmaking by algorithm, but that doesn’t make it bad. Southern Comfort is full of tension and moves at a brisk pace. The booby-trapped bayou and the clash of personalities among the guardsmen will leave you waiting to see who’s going to get it next and how. A violent pig slaughter interspersed with Cajun villagers singing and dancing while the hunters search for the surviving guardsmen is particularly tense.

Plot-driven as the movie is, the ensemble cast doesn’t need to do much to make it work. Keith Carradine doesn’t even bother to fake an accent – or develop a physique — as Spencer, a “city boy” who eventually takes command. Fred Ward is decidedly more convincing as Reece, a sadistic, belligerent redneck bent on revenge. The real star, however, is Powers Boothe. As sour-faced Texan Hardin, he does the anti-hero/survivalist thing to a T.


Like previous Hill releases, the setting allows the film to reach higher thematic ground than either the acting or the script suggest. It can be read as an anti-war movie in that it shows what happens when a group of armed and uniformed foreigners – several of them psychotic or incompetent – charge into a hostile backcountry. At the same time, it never feels like a polemic. Between the vengefulness of the Cajuns and the guardsmen’s penchant for stirring up trouble, there’s more than enough blame to go around.


7/10