Just perfect...

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This movie is for people who have been in love or like watching movies about love. Though this movie isn't your cliché type of love story (it also contains aspects on the Cuban revolution) the chore of the movie revolves around love.The movie is about a simple man (Jack) who visits Havana because he loves to gamble, to meet the woman (Roberta) that would change his outlook and life forever. She fights for the resistance, against Batista, while he's not into politics at all. She's married with a man (Arturo) that is the head of the resistance in Havana. When Arturo gets kidnapped and is considered killed, Jack and Roberta have the chance to fall in love. But Jack finds out that Arturo is still alive and faces the choice of letting Roberta go or staying quite...This is one of the most real, deep and touching love stories I have seen. It contains beautiful poetic dialogues and the acting is great. A beautiful story about the meaning of love, sacrifice combined with the Cuban revolution.

This film only has 4 problems with it, that I can see. 1. Its raison d'être. 2. The screenplay. 3. The acting. 4. The directing. The actors, devoid of any visible passion, sleepwalk through their lines. The attempted "style" Pollack seems to be shooting for rings as tinny and artificial as Hollywood. The Left-loving and sun-damaged Redford does his best to act debonair, but maybe a bit too much. Lena is stunning as always, but her Prozac-induced acting serves only to make the film mildly amusing...and very mildly at that. The movie was doomed before Pollack ever yelled "action." It's as if a film school teacher hastily threw together a bunch of ingredients straight out of Casablanca, then instructed "only make it set in Havana...go!" and expected a masterpiece. Asking a viewer who's not a socialist himself to care about a cause as nefarious as Castro's Communist Cuba is a stretch for anyone with a modicum of patriotism and knowledge of history, no matter how beautiful the leading couple may try to be or how many gratuitous flesh scenes are thrown in. The parallels to the classic "Casablanca" are numerous and haranguing; from the film's city name to the suave man-about-town leading character who wonders if he should sacrifice his personal desires for a(n allegedly) greater cause, to his illicit love interest's being a married Swedish woman loyal to her husband's political passion. Besides being a shameless rip-off of an actually good motion picture, this film flops because it fails to make us care about anyone in it. Other than left-wing ideologues, who would ever feel moved to care about an adulterous gambler and a couple of communist revolutionaries? Victor Laszlo was on a valid mission--to combat the radical politics of worldwide domination, tyranny and murder. Rick and Ilsa fell in love before he ever found out about her marriage, and we cared because we felt they belonged together, yet understood the more compelling cause that forced them to remain apart. This film tried to copy a similar formula with the cause of Communist revolution, but we all know the results: a dictator far more murderous than Batista, who has kept his country mired in misery and mediocrity ever since.

I've seen it at the movies when it was released - it captured me! I bought the DVD some ten years later and I've watched it about 3x so far - and with every time I've watched it, it got worse. I haven't quite managed to put my finger on it as to the "why?" I mean, the ingredients are there: Great, experienced actors with an impressive track record and delivering great performances, a great location, the material/historic backdrop feels authentic and should make for some additional drama in its own right, music by - come on! That's GOTTA count for something - Dave Grusin, an experienced director and a great book. But something's completely - I mean COMPLETELY! - off about the whole thing... It "feels" like coffee that's been sitting in the pot all day, like veggies that have been simmering for a hair too long, like whipped cream that's been in the sun for a few seconds too long... shall I go on? But why? WHAT exactly is it? Is it the timing? I'm thinking, it must have to do with the timing and pace of the flick, every line of dialog feels just shallow and almost empty and in a way corny, when they deliver it. Maybe Redford tries to hard to be all cool about this, maybe Olin wants to come across as Latina too hard, the entire thing feels as if everyone had overeaten and was tired from that when coming to the set... It's a shame... the material COULD have made for another classic much along the lines of its famous precursor. But in the end, it all feels like wanting to replace Coca Cola by Pepsi - not the real thing and totally dispensable... The box-office failure is totally deserved in my view...

Jack Weil, played by Robert Redford, feels at home in this corrupt city… He's a professional gambler looking for the game of his life… He played in every Elks Club and Moose Hall in America… He remembers every hand of every game and now he wants a shot, only one shot in Havana… But while he is on the verge of winning everything Bobby Duran (Lena Olin) has lost all she ever knew… Olin plays the wife of a Cuban revolutionary, Raul Julia… Bobby has nothing to lose or to protect… And in a super-natural and strange way Jack reaches her… And so, as Cuba crumbles Jack is drawn in Bobby's world of the revolutionaries and, in one crucial moment he sees himself he must choose between the greatest card game of his life and the woman he loves… There's a kind of exotic combination between Redford and Olin's characters… Between Redford's very American, blond, golden look and Olin's dark, intense Swedish expression…Sydney Pollack's "Havana" is a love story that takes place during the week of Christmas, 1958 which was the last week Batista was in power before Castro came in… It was the last week of this kind of a circus that Havana was… An attractive city full of gambling, of burlesque, of every kind of hedonistic pleasure possible