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Here is further proof that the third installment of a franchise is inevitably the weakest, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is a retread of not only the two previous entries in the trilogy but the entirety of Ray Harryhausen’s career. There’s no wonder here, no fun sense of otherworldliness at play. In fact, even Harryhausen’s creations are more humdrum than life giving to this limp piece of cornbread.
While neither Seventh Voyage nor Golden Voyage could claim modesty in how often and routinely they paused their narratives to bring in more fantastical creatures, Eye of the Tiger makes them look positively prudish in comparison. But the excess on display here has a strangely numbing effect since so much of has been done already by the master, and better. There’s ghouls, a metallic Minotaur, a troglodyte, a gigantic walrus, a chess-playing chimpanzee, a gigantic wasp, a Smilodon, and a witch who can change sizes and transform into a bird.
But none of them are as imaginatively rendered as they should be. I suppose one should be kind to Harryhausen for this, as even he admitted that there just wasn’t enough time and money granted to him to make the effects really pop. They’re perfunctory from beginning to end leaving Eye of the Tiger as the nadir of Harryhausen’s career. It feels wrong to criticize a master of his craft who has so incalculably aided to my imaginative development, but Eye of the Tiger is just not good or original enough by any measure.
Too much of Eye of the Tiger feels built upon the foundations of other material. There’s Melanthius, a Greek alchemist/exposition dump played by Patrick Troughton like a dry-run for Gandalf in a never-made Harryhausen Lord of the Rings adaptation. There’s Zenobia, another Sinbad movie offers up a dark-arts practitioner as its main villain, this time an evil stepmother played to theatrical heights by Margaret Whiting. Jane Seymour gets saddled with the poorly written love interest role, and Patrick Wayne is a hopelessly wooden Sinbad. The role of Sinbad is something of a mixed blessing for any actor. On one hand you’re the title character, on the other you’re merely a blank space for Harryhausen’s creativity to throw swords and magic spells at. Kerwin Mathews and John Phillip Law were likable, handsome, and knew how to give themselves to the material, while Wayne is just kinda…there.
The worst offender has to be director Sam Wanamaker. He splices the film with little regards or care for creating intelligible spatial geography and basic filmic geometry. He also allows too much bloat to make its way into this. Golden Voyage’s 105 minutes was pushing the boundaries for how long this material could sustain itself, and Eye of the Tiger’s near two-hours is clearly beyond the thin story’s reach. The better directors of Harryhausen’s films knew they were traffic cops trying to keep everything running smoothly, so I guess you could dub this film something of a pile-up.
Distinct and unique sense of mythology and location is noticeably absent here. Where the previous films were gleeful in the ways they mixed disparate bits of cultural mythologies into their whimsical hodge-podges, this feels lazily assembled. There’s obvious stealing from She in the pyramid hidden away in an arctic tundra, complete with steep stairs, a light vortex, and frozen Smilodons. Then there’s the oddball way that our characters enter a valley that either spits them out into a lovely spring and forest, or they walk back a desert pyramid. Looking for logic in these films is a bit of a stretch, but a certain set of fair rules and coherence by their own internal workings is not asking for much.
Yet I still possess a modicum of affection for it. Call it the hazy gaze of childhood nostalgia, call it my deep fondness and love of Harryhausen, call it what you will. Undoubtedly this is the lamest of the Sinbad films, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t stir some strange form of fondness in me. Hell that battle royale between the troglodyte, Smilodon, and Sinbad is a vast improvement over the Golden Voyage’s climax, and if you only watch Eye of the Tiger for that one scene, well, it’s a damn fine scene.
