Deliverance (1972) – Review

For such a seemingly “normal” director as John Boorman, he didn’t half go all in when it came to cramming cinema full of batshit, crazy. Between the years of 1967 and 1981 alone he’d given us the dreamy crime stylings of Point Blank, a sequel to The Exorcist that felt like a dose of bad peyote, Excalibur’s irony-free take on Arthurian legend and the sight of Sean Connery in a red nappy in the sci-fi freakout known as Zardoz – and yet in 1972, Boorman delivered an undisputed masterpiece that ranks as his best work.
You could label Deliverance as the modern touchstone to every single vacation-gone-wrong horror/thiller made since rhe 70s and you’d be absolutely right – after all, what is The Hills Have Eyes or Wrong Turn, but a gross exaggeration of Boorman’s take no prisoners thriller – but aside of being a prime example of what you’d essentially get if you were to bleed all the exploitation out of a horror film, the film also is a nexus point of every thriller/horror/adventure flick you’ve ever seen.

A quartet of businessmen from Atlanta have decided to spend their weekend canoing in the remote northern Georgia wilderness to take advantage of the area before the building of a nearby dam means that the entire area will soon be eradicated by the resulting deluge. Leading the pack is Lewis, the egotistical, alpha male outdoorsman of the group and he’s joined by his friend, Ed, and two utter novices when it comes to braving the wild in the form of Bobby and Drew.
Upon arriving, the group alternate from being fairly dismissive of the native townsfolk while Lewis pontificates at great length about the subject of man vs nature and how our rape of the natural world will soon come back to bite us right in the ass; but generally the mood is upbeat – especially when Drew engages in an impressive impromptu duet with a banjo playing child. After arranging to have their cars to be driven to their destination while they brave the river for fun, the group settle into their respective roles with Lewis going even further into his ego trip and Drew and Bobby firmly cementing their “city boy” status. However, after an intimate moment where Ed physically finds it impossible to shoot a deer with his bow, thus putting him somewhere in the middle when it comes to negotiating the great outdoors, but after a fateful – and incredibly traumatic – run in with a couple of mountain men, the group find themselves under siege at at the mercy of both their attackers and nature in general.
Soon, this weekend getaway becomes a full blown battle for survival that will have devastating repercussions even if they do survive.

Despite its fairly minimalist presentation, there’s still an impressive amount to unpack about Deliverance once you start peeling back the layers like an absolutely terrifying onion. Firstly, there’s the noticably prevalent eco message going on as it’s man’s endless obsession about putting a leash on nature that kicks everything off to begin with. The four city boys are only here in the first place because, due to building of a new dam, the river they are so eager to paddle down soon won’t even exist and even the local town has been evacuated for that exact, same reason. In fact, Burt Reynolds’ posturing Lewis seemingly won’t shut up about it, which is ironic considering that, in his own way, he’s arrived to make his make on nature himself.
This also leads us nicely into another of the film’s themes as it has a few choice words to say about machismo and masculinity that are nicely summarised by the differences in the core group. Reynolds (never better) is perfect as the swaggering, know it all alpha who waxes lyrical about nature (“Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything.”) while still insisting on referring to Ned Beatty’s Bobby as “Chubby” all the way through the trip. While Beatty and Ronny Cox’s Drew are admittedly from the softer end of the city dwellers, we find Jon Voight’s Ed floating around somewhere in the inbetween. Unwilling to fully prescribe to Lewis’ boastful gushing about the natural world, he does still find himself drawn to it – especially during the telling moment when he can’t bring himself to kill a deer. However, when you have four men as your leads in a film that broached the subject of masculinity, you need a threat to properly damage that, and it’s here where Deliverance has you horrifically covered.

Before we get to the infamous and immortal “squeal like a pig” scene, it’s worth pointing out how much creepy foreshadowing Boorman laces the film with until we get to that seminal moment. The equally iconic “duelling banjos” moment, where Drew and a mentally impaired, hillbilly child may be quite fun on the surface, but the child’s savant playing, mixed with his utterly blank expression, suggest that these guys may as well be on Venus, rather than anywhere where their obnoxious city charms will save them.
And then it happens, and as a stripped nude Ned Beatty moans into the dirt as a malevolent hillbilly has his way with him, Boorman brings this themes crashing in on us. Not only is the ghastly (and prolonged) act of male rape the perfect way to attack the machismo of the straight, white, middleaged male, but the director seems to be literally stating that if you fuck with nature, nature’s somehow going to find a way to fuck you back.
From this devastating moment, the movie shifts gears into literal survival mode after a well placed arrow brings the assault to a merciful close, but even here, Boorman continues to chip away at the male ego by waylaying the swaggering Lewis with a broken leg, making the group’s more powerful asset into its biggest liability. We should have pretty much guessed this from the start, especially when you realise how screwed these guys actually are once you clock that Reynolds isn’t wearing his iconic moustache which makes them all feel as horribly vunerable as Neo fighting Agent Smith without his shades on.
The cast all deliver Revenant-scale performances as the script puts them through utter hell. In fact, aside from Beatty having to undergo the agonisingly overlong sexual assault, both Voight and Reynolds do a worrying amount of their own stunts, scaling cliff faces and hurling themselves over waterfalls as if the terrible pull of the wild had affected the very actors themselves; but the upside is that the tension is so thick, you could chew on it like day-old steak.

Both deceptively simple, yet overwhelmingly complex, I would happily label Deliverance as one of the greatest thrillers ever made, but surely its greatest achievement is the fact that it birthed a wasteland of ruined, cinematic vacations that still shows no sign of slowing.
In other words, this movie has a real pretty mouth…

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