Adam Driver is in most of his output a horrendously insufferable watch, but he’s good in this film. You don’t have to attempt to muster the minerals to take him seriously or put up with his Emo masquerade and he emerges as quite the comedian.
It’s just a shame that in other flicks he appears to think he’s James Dean.
A passable, occasionally amusing movie.
Bad auguries from kickoff in the script department when a security guard (or whatever) emerges from a ship that’s just nestled on a landing pad and smugly announces, “We made it.”
You’re kidding me?! You just gave the impression you didn’t make it.
What an unbridled farce it all is. But the dialogue especially is the worst of any Star Wars outing ever, characters unable to go 30 seconds without spitting nonsense or telling us what they are doing as if we are at the blind school, imperative piled upon imperative.
The editing is amateur hour. I sat incredulous, legit open-mouthed at most of the cutting choices – why Lucas cuts to another angle for no apparent reason, why he inexplicably holds a shot for an age after someone has finished speaking (gibberish).
And Yoda wielding a lightsaber is a sequence that belongs in a skip. All mystique was sucked from the green dwarf right there in a classic case of jumping the shark Yoda.
Oh, it’s a bloomin’ awful car crash of a flick and I watched it because there is something wrong with me. There’s a lot wrong with me.
An intolerable movie, this was a noisy affair, so unnecessarily loud, repetitive, wholly unimaginative, and just plain boring.
I hated it and hope you do too.
The stories were rampant at the time and bloody hell they were amusing: Brando refusing to be directed by Frank Oz for he moonlighted as a Muppet, Miss Piggy to be exact. The lionised thesp apparently took an instant dislike to the bloke, so Bobby De Niro had to take over directing duties, Brando fed instructions through an earpiece.
Frank Oz valiantly played Yoda through all of his incarnations, for fuck’s sake. Give him some slack, Marlon!
Anyway, it’s three generations of method maestros sharing the screen; sadly, none of them chew the scenery and you can just imagine what Michael Mann or someone of that caliber would have done with the material, even if the script is a bog-standard bag of cliches.
A movie completely bereft of style, any Tom, Dick or Harry could have put this together, as it’s as visually nondescript and anonymous as a hundred TV movies from the past 30 years. Only this came out in cinemas and features three quite extraordinary actors.
It’s good enough, but 90 mins of the three of them having an unscripted conversation in a pub toilet would have been more engaging.
It’s a one-in-a-million movie that shouldn’t exist. But it’s here … with us.
And it’s an utter riot, from Billy Zane with hair to Michael Biehn spouting Latin. It’s indeed a frenzy of quotes, with Val Kilmer’s lines more like witty sayings you gleefully take into life than the casual dialogue of his permanently plastered Doc Holliday.
A perfectly orchestrated yarn and the definitive O.K. Corral flick, it works as elegiac drama and pure entertainment. It’s the kind of Western Martin Scorsese would have made, such is the movie’s vibrancy and the finesse of the direction.
Kilmer is at his most weird and iconic here, his best ever performance. It’s so unlike anything else he did, and I can’t recall many other actors creating such an impression in a supporting role. You think of Doc Holliday, you see Val Kilmer in an instant. Alas, despite the mammoth career he had, it never quite matched his undoubted talent.
His wee swansong in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was a lovely, heartfelt touch from Cruise, but it’s sad to see. It’s taken on a greater resonance now.
Wee stroll around Haymarket, Edinburgh, and within two minutes I’m assaulted by an ad for Snow White (2025) emblazoned on the side of a manky bus to Wester Hailes, immediately followed by a vessel to East Craigs with a Cinderella panto gig (starring the redoubtable Grant Stott) draped beneath its windows.
Meanwhile, a lad was carrying a rug over his shoulder into your generic ‘Men with Ven’ and I had Aladdin’s magic carpet in my head.
My mind has been infected by corporations today.
It now functions as a low-rent Disney medley.
Bye for now.
It’s certifiably COOL and immaculately framed, from a director who understands framing and why it matters.
Ryan O’Neal is once again in a masterwork in which he’s the only actor you can envisage as the protagonist. No one else did impassive cool like him, and it’s even a cool that suggests dimensions behind the glacial exterior. His career never progressed beyond that ’70s apex because director’s didn’t use him properly, oblivious to the magnetism and effortless insouciance he could radiate within a narrow range.
You don’t need a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue in a movie this visual, which is what movies are, first and foremost. And the verbal exchanges may be minimal, but memorable, nonetheless.
Why is this so stylish? It’s from 1978. Influential is the term.
Was my fond memory of this movie clouded by nostalgia? Of course it was, but it’s not entirely rubbish.
We have embarrassingly cruddy dialogue exchanges and a bog-standard voice-over which is so nondescript it could be applied to a hundred movies. It runs out of ideas after 45 minutes, but looks and sounds glorious despite all the unchallenged British imperialism on display.
There is a ‘wasted opportunity’ dimension to it, given the highly respected screenwriter William Goldman penned the screenplay, and the Michael Douglas deuteragonist is as multi-dimensional as a Ned robbing Toilet Duck from a Lidl, in broad daylight, wearing a tracksuit from 1977. And Ice Man and Gekko’s methods of snaring this man-eating beastly duo aren’t imaginative and wearily become tiresome.
It’s nothing special; it’s not garbage, either, because it’s kind of funny.
But I don’t think Roger Ebert liked it much.
Even if Alex Ferns, a.k.a. wife-beating EastEnders villain Trevor Morgan, makes an appearance.
Eavesdropping on the Lothian Buses no. 29 bus brought me here.
Christoph Waltz features so I thought it worth a proverbial bash. It looks spectacular in an anonymous way. It’s cliche-ridden to the max. It gets boring very quickly.
I evacuated after 34 minutes.
Next.
The opening is ingenious, a peach of gleefully shameless gore and sadly the rest of the movie can’t top it. It’s a neat wee concept for a horror but it’s as predictable as you get. I made a wee bet (with myself) that one of the characters would allude to the Mary Celeste. Within half an hour they did exactly that.
These movies are funny – actor-stars like Gabriel Byrne turning up in dross for the lolly. Why not? I’d do the same if I were still offered decent scripts after my sins.
Some of the kills were amusing. It looks fine enough. It’s stupid, but I wasn’t bothered. A shitter to watch if you’re ever on a DFDS Seaways and you have fuck all else to do as the bar has closed.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 