Non-2019 First Time Watches Ranked

Film #19 of my Chain Reaction Challenge

I firmly believed this film was gonna fall into the "would've liked it more had I watched it sooner" camp, but no. This is amazing.

It would be entirely justifiable to claim that the story for this is incredibly generic. It 100% is. Princess falls in love. Gets kidnapped by bad guy, Good guy must rescue her. You've seen it 1000 times before. But what makes this work is the writing.

One; the dialogue is fantastic. The movie is infinitely quotable and the dialogue is funny and never feels forced. Two; the minor characters are all built up fantastically. Some may say Inigo Montoya is one of the greatest minor characters ever, and I wouldn't argue with them. But all of the minor characters are great in this because they're written incredibly well.

The performances are all great as well. As mentioned, Mandy Patinkin is brilliant and arguably the true standout as Inigo Montoya. Despite having never seen this, I was more than aware with the infamous line "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." The two leads, Cary Elwes and Robin Wright are both solid in this. As are our two antagonists played by Chris Sarandon and Christopher Guest. I was genuinely surprised at how well Andre the Giant did. He had some of the best lines in the film and while the delivery of them was sometimes a little clunky, it wasn't bad at all considering English wasn't his first language. I think my favourite non-Inigo performance belonged to Billy Crystal who played the retired wizard, Miracle Max. He was hilarious in a small role where, if you didn't know it was him, you'd be saying "I know that voice, who is that?"

I can confidently say that even though I loved this, if I had watched it growing up, this would be in my Top 100, probably even as high as Top 20. For now, it is a film I thoroughly enjoyed and am excited to check out again in the future.