The Mission

Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields) directs this fuzzy effort at a David Lean-like epic without David Lean's sense of emotional proportion. Lean's most important screenwriting collaborator, Robert Bolt, in fact wrote The Mission, which concerns a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) who establishes a church in the hostile jungles of Brazil and then finds his work threatened by greed and political forces among his superiors. Robert De Niro is briefly effective as a callous soldier who kills his own brother and then turns to Irons's character to oversee his penance and conversion to the clergy. The narrative and dramatic forces at work in this movie should be more stirring and powerful than they are--the problem being that Joffé is too removed from them to allow us in. --Tom Keogh

Movie Details

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn, Cherie Lunghi, Ronald Pickup, Chuck Low, Liam Neeson, Bercelio Moya, Sigifredo Ismare, Asuncion Ontiveros, Alejandrino Moya, Daniel Berrigan, Rolf Gray
MPAA Rating: PG
Running time: 126 min
DVD Aspect Ratios: 2.20:1

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DVD Features:

• Color
• Closed-captioned
• Widescreen
• Dolby

International rating:

Europe: PG
Australia: PG

DVD International release dates:
North America: May 13, 03

VHS International release dates:
North America: Dec 4, 92