Five Came Back

Directed by John Farrow, Five Came Back follows several airline passengers, including Lucille Ball’s Peggy and John Carradine’s Crimp, as they’re forced to fend for their lives after their plane crashes in the jungle. Filmmaker Farrow, working from Jerome Cady, Dalton Trumbo, and Nathanael West’s screenplay, delivers a watchable yet mostly forgettable endeavor that often feels long even at just 75 minutes, as the movie boasts an assortment of characters that aren’t, generally speaking, as compelling or well-developed as one might’ve hoped – which ensures that the viewer’s ongoing efforts at working up much interest in or sympathy for the protagonists’ increasingly perilous exploits fall flat. (This is despite the inclusion of a few happenings and encounters straight out of the television series Lost.) And although the movie suffers from a meandering midsection in desperate need of streamlining, Five Came Back eventually progresses into an unexpectedly compelling and sporadically tense final third that’s capped off with an almost impressively bleak finale – with the end result a decent-enough drama that generally feels like it could (and should) be better.

**1/2 out of ****

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