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Just what I expected

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I must say, I loved about every Sidney Lumet film I've seen. There's not one I dislike. He's made a good movie, over and over again, The Morning After, a one off. This one is no exception. Though I've never seen the play, and I never will, this movie has been finely crafted with some beautifully haunting moments. They're the shots of our naked boy on horseback, stroking it, talking to it, with that use of enhanced light and also the beautiful though slightly unnerving music score. No doubt, horse lovers, should avoid this film, due to the quite graphic blinding horses scene, where our mentally disturbed teen, Alan Strang (a brilliant Peter Firth) goes berserk one night, following a sexual encounter mishap with another stable hand (Agutter- An American Werewolf In London) where both bare all. He's taken in by psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Burton, powerfully good, one of those legendary and classic actors we fondly lose) He councils Firth through his problems, and finding the catalyst for his destructive and horrific actions, that night, though may'be I'm coming in a little bit too strong there, in my wording. Burton has a few powerful soliloquy's, and I really enjoyed these, but they really don't work to effect, I found, as for the movie, or intended, for the film makers, too, I'm assuming. Joan Plowright as Firth's religious driven mother is superb, while the undermined father (Colin Blakely), the weaker one in the relationship, is fantastic too, where I could really feel this guy's pain and frustration. But it's Firth's performance, that will grab you. It's a young (although Firth was 24 at the time) seasoned, professional masterpiece of acting, utilizing many body and facial gestures, being very creative, and imaginative, which of course are an actor's tools. Of course, the burning question, we want to know, is what drove this young boy with such a love of horses to commit such a horrid act, where it can be a combination of things here, where after it's ending, we're left to form our own opinions, which is kind of a bugger. The movie does work with a prudent handling of story from play, and Lumet, one of those directors who makes movies I like, over and over again, has wonderfully made it so. I love watching a movie too, with great actors, and here, the casting is spot on, and I'm talking Agutter too.

one of Richard Burton splendid roles. the convincing performance of Peter Firth. a good play. short, one of movies who remains a web of questions, emotions, stains of feelings because it is a kind of descent in yourself. sure, many critics , result of nostalgia for play adaptation on stage. but it is not a version. only a precise film inspired by the Schaffer universe. the director does an admirable work first for refuse of confrontation with the text. it is a splendid exploration of details and a fight between two manners to discover life. it is a precise construction using few extraordinaries images. a film about lost and axis of life, about values and need to escape from a fake image of world. it is necessary to see it. not only for acting - it is beautiful at whole. not for subject - it could be not new. but for the grace of details. and for the pillars- questions who can give another nuance , for two hours to an ordinary day.

Sidney Lumet's film-dramatisation of Peter Shaffer's shocking stage-play "Equus", is an undeniably difficult, often overbearing but occasionally enlightening examination of the suppressed sexuality of a teenage boy brought up in a closeted household by two of the most repressed parents you could meet this side of Mary Whitehouse. Through the prism of child - psychiatrist extraordinaire, played masterfully by Richard Burton, the boy's dark secret as to why he blinded six horses he's employed to look after as stable-boy, comes to light in a harrowing and bloody conclusion.I've only ever seen the play once before and that some twenty years ago in an earnest and truncated version at the Edinburgh Festival and was wary of the movie not slipping its theatrical moorings as it is, on paper, a very static and wordy piece. For the first half or more however, director Lumet accomplishes this, centred round the well-dramatised recollection of the boy Alan Strang's (Peter Firth) first encounter with a horse on the beach interpolated with natural changes of location at the school, Strang's parents' house and the stables where he finds work and makes the ill-fated acquaintance of fellow-worker Jenny Agutter, who is again required to remove her clothing at a key part of the narrative (like in "Walkabout").The film is slow-moving at times and over-burdened with a little too much angst from both teacher and pupil. Firth's raising up of the horse-god "Equus" from the dark recesses of his battered consciousness and Burton's pieces-to-camera play up the artificiality of the piece too much and I also think the relationship of Strang's screwed-up parents too close to caricature - it's impossible to ever imagine them as a "normal" loving couple. I have to say too that I found the sexual imagery of the boy with the stallions a little over-the-top and unsettling too...and yet there are effective sequences too, evincing real drama and power, particularly in some of the doctor-patient exchanges between Burton and Firth, while the infamous nude scene between the young couple which immediately prefigures Strang's bloody breakdown and the gory conclusion itself, is handled surely and sensitively.As an examination of the coming of age of an emotionally crippled young man, beset by demons arising from his over-weaned childhood, "Equus" is hit and miss. Some of the main acting too, by the likes of Colin Blakely and Joan Plowright as the boy's parents and occasionally Firth himself is for want of a better word very obviously stagy. Burton does best in a showy part, deserving of his Oscar nomination but handicapped by his character's stereotypical frailties and a tendency to expostulate, particularly with the female teacher from whom's he's holding back his own sexual attraction -it's she who starts off proceedings by bringing Strang to him as the archetypal "impossible case"."Equus" in the end is more Aintree "Grand National" steeplechase than Epsom Derby sprint, with perhaps too many fences over the course, but if you're still standing at the end, there are some rewards to be savoured, particular in some of Lumet's direction and most of Burton's acting.

Peter Shaffer's screenplay ought to have made a fascinating and puzzling story although, to be sure, this isn't director Sidney Lumet's usual territory. Lumet handles torment deftly enough but the torment is found in New York City.Here, the setting is England, and Lumet does his best, as do the performers, but it seems to me that they're all hobbled by a screenplay that mixes all kinds of confused metaphysics with some extraordinary psychopathology.Peter Firth plays a rather ordinary English lad who has been fascinated by horses since childhood. Okay, lots of girls find horses sexy, but Firth's equipoise is such that he's obsessed with them and loses touch with the humdrum world of his family and friends. He worships these dumb brutes.He's confined to a funny farm after a savage attack on half a dozen horses at the stable he works in -- a scene based on a real incident. Under the care of Richard Burton, a psychiatrist, he reveals, little by little, the developments that led up to this heinous act.Briefly, he's come to think of horses as some kind of Godhead. He fantasizes about stripping naked and riding them through the night, sharing food with them, caressing them, freeing them from their chains even through self sacrifice.Then he's confronted by a posh girl at the stables named Jill. She's played by Jenny Agutter. Agutter's tastes run more to the physical than the theological. She's attracted to him and tries to seduce him in the loft of the stable, while the horses below snuffle and stomp. Now, Jenny Agutter is a very attractive young lady with the face of an Alien from outer space and a figure at once sinewy and voluptuous. Firth is a guy who can get off by thinking about riding horses bareback and in the nude, but he can't manage to be turgid while making love to Agutter. Right away, we're convinced this kid is really sick.All the while he's writhing on top of her, he's thinking about the horses. He believes they're staring at him. You know, "Our God is a jealous God"? So he throws out the naked Agutter and puts out the eyes of the horses.And what is Doctor Burton's response to all this? He's JEALOUS of the kid's passion! His own life is that of an urban bourgeois. He's been married to the same sensible woman for years and theirs has become what family therapists call a companionate marriage. Her job is to run the comfortable house. His job is to make the salad while she prepares dinner. He feels his life lacks ardor because he doesn't suffer from transcendental zoophilia.There are a few striking moments in the film: (1) when Firth goes for his first pony ride at the beach; (2) a nicely photographed scene when Firth gallops a horse through the fields and evidently ejaculates; (3) the fully nude episode with Jenny Agutter in the loft; and (4) the monstrous attack on the innocent horses.The rest is talk. Fully blown talk, elegant in grammar and imagery, not at all like the garden-variety speech that people use in everyday life. For my taste, admittedly warped, there are too many scenes of Richard Burton looming over his recalcitrant patient and shouting, "TELL me!" Burton does the best he can. His voice is incomparable but the character is so sullen that his presence brings little joy to the screen. Firth has the juiciest part.The model of psychosis we see in this movie is supposed to be based on an historical incident but, man, does it romanticize madness. Firth's character doesn't do any of the things that ordinary psychotics do. His gibberish is the gibberish of James Joyce in "Finnegans Wake." The only REALLY odd thing he does, aside from spurning Agutter, is to blind those horses. He doesn't go about in tattered clothing. He doesn't speak to himself. He doesn't masturbate in public. He's lively and clever, rather than flat and empty.I wonder, too, if some of the story is at least in part a joke from the author. Peter Shaffer, the playwright, has a twin brother Anthony who also writes plays ("Sleuth"). And Firth's mother has a line in which she attributes Firth's initial fascination with horses to the fact that their genus is "Equus" and the kid had never seen a word with "two yous" before. Well, with "Equus" on one side and "Sleuth" on the other, the equupoise is nearly perfect.