Atlas Shrugged: Part 2

The second third of Ayn Rand’s long novel comes to the screen with an entirely new cast and director (John Putch); only producers John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow and writer Brian Patrick O’Toole (joined by Duke Sandefur and Duncan Scott) are back from before. Still, the result is the same: a respectable effort hampered less by its limited budget than by the dogmatic contrivances of Rand’s plot and the straw-man polemics of her wooden, declamatory dialogue. Samantha Mathis steps easily in as railroad magnate Dagny Taggart; Jason Beghe is less successful as Hank Rearden (speaking in a raspy whisper like a dinner-theater Clint Eastwood). As with Part I, Rand’s detractors will hate the movie as much as they do her, but her fans will be satisfied, both of them for the same reasons.