The Mosquito Coast

Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: November 26, 1986

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

49	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 12 Critic Reviews

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Critic Reviews

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TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

A courageous and serious film that explores the limits of the mythic American virtues of persistence, inventiveness, and rugged individualism. Read full review

Sheila Benson

Weir's orchestrated The Mosquito Coast's action to match Fox's progressive mental state, from rage to explosion to squalls and finally to hurricane velocity; however, the film leaves us not with an apotheosis, but exhaustion. [26 Nov 1986]

Staff (Not Credited)

It is hard to believe that a film as beautiful as The Mosquito Coast [adapted from the novel by Paul Theroux] can also be so bleak, but therein lies its power and undoing. Read full review

Paul Attanasio

The Mosquito Coast is the only movie you'll see this season that has too much ambition for its own good - its subject, really, is nothing less than the American experience. Read full review

Rita Kempley

As a persona of epic polarities, [Harrison Ford] animates this muddled, metaphysical journey into the jungle. Read full review

Pat Graham

Peter Weir's 1986 adaptation of Paul Theroux's best-selling novel is literally that - an adaptation without much character of its own. Read full review

Roger Ebert

The movie has been directed and acted so well, in fact, that almost all my questions have to do with the script: Why was the hero made so uncompromisingly hateful? Read full review

David Sterritt

What keeps The Mosquito Coast from being a great movie is too much caution. Read full review

Jay Scott

The Mosquito Coast is a work of consummate craftsmanship and it's spectacularly acted, down to the smallest roles (Martha Plimpton as a classically obstreperous preacher's daughter, for example), but its field of vision is as narrow and eventually as claustrophobic as Allie's. [28 Nov 1986]

Vincent Canby

In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat. Read full review

Julie Salamon

The picture's blandness - and hollowness - is startling when you consider the collaborators. [26 Nov 1986]

Richard Schickel

The problem is that the high-pitched whine of Allie's character finally vitiates not merely the viewer's sympathy for him, but sympathy for the movie he dominates, despite the care and courage that went into its making. Read full review