What I liked most about this preposterous movie was how low-budget, small-scale and basically cruddy it came across despite the titanic cast. It’s like a made-for-TV thriller sketched off a napkin that was once owned by Clint Eastwood and tossed into a dustbin in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
This baffling, wholly ludicrous film somehow stars and is directed by Clint Eastwood.
The Crow (1994) is a good-looking affair with an outstanding score, but that’s all it is.
The rote plot and villains, and the unimaginative shoot-outs bore me very quickly, and by the end of the movie I was just thankful it was all over and the lad went back to his grave. All dressing on a thin story, it’s another example of a cult movie having that cult status mainly because of the circumstances surrounding its production. And that’s just wrong.
Watch it if it’s there; I wouldn’t recommend you go hunting for it. Set design doesn’t make a film.
The pompous, pathetic (and bathetic) opening here, and I’m talking the first two minutes, is so beyond reproach in its inflated histrionics, I almost gave up right there and then. But I refrained from jettisoning Cromwell (1970) in favour of a nap as I thought I just might be in for a hammy treat, regardless of the garbage factor.
I lasted another seven minutes before terminating this worthless tripe, in which Richard Harris’s eponymous quasi-revolutionary literally looks permanently constipated.
If we’re on the theme of excrement, the movie has a desperate stink to it, clearly wishing to ape the likes of peak David Lean as an epic biopic of a British titan, and it even features Alec Guinness.
Sadly, it’s shite.
.
This has a very liberal use of the F-word. It’s the director’s way of making his protagonist (also the director) appear to be an ‘ard cunt, but then as every sub-soap opera actor in this torporific wreck is constantly swearing for no apparent reason, and they all look and act the same, it’s impossible to distinguish one non-talented sub-soap opera ‘actor’ from the other. I was reminded of Alien 3 (1992) with its prison of shaven-headed felons and how they all may as well have been played by the same actor; this movie is just like that, but sadly an alien doesn’t arrive and casually murder everyone.
We also have loadsamoney and loadsacoke and lads constantly smoking, and cups of tea and scenes propelled with mundane chat around whether someone wants a cup of tea in this cruddy, turgid mess of a turd that has no reason to exist and essentially consists of non-characters sat in a room brooding when they aren’t leathering someone. I don’t even know what this film was meant to be about.
The worst example of British cinema.
A strong 0/5.
A bad Scorsese movie is a depressing experience, and this was soaringly bad.
And then Danny Huston turned up and it just descended into beyond bad. This bloke sinks, or further buries, so many motion pictures you begin to wonder what goods he has on directors.
Pointless pish that must have cost a fucking fortune, it feels like a movie that Scorsese was contractually obligated to make, because I see no other reason for this lightweight embarrassment to exist.
I’ve had more interesting adventures in a B&M than this biopic of Howard Hughes.
This bloke, Hank Worden, is the worst actor that has ever ‘graced’ the silver screen, and his Mose Harper in The Searchers (1956) is what prevents that movie from being a masterpiece.
For a topic seemingly so universal, this movie is trivial overkill to the max. Schematic, derivative, dire in its desperation to be something elevated beyond your standard Woody-Allen-with-an-edge (the edge is memory wiping in this one) snapshot of relationships, it stinks of needy filmmaking, and I’d lump it down there with Garden State (2004) as one of the worst of that era.
The boredom levels were high. I was mostly just … bored, even if everyone in it aside from Tom Wilkinson is a vexing hysteric. In this way, the film is insightful. People who dye their hair don’t have an actual personality. In general.
The lad who just wishes to make his birdhouse, though. He was funny:
A first viewing here for this shitter featuring an odd couple in Sly and Kurt, odd in that they’re both disturbingly similar in delivery and demeanour, though Kurt Russell can emote with less awkwardness and the writers try to make him seem wild by having a mullet. Great screenwriting ….
My only prior knowledge of the flick stems from a lad I used to work with who expressed perpetual regret for choosing this over Goodfellas (1990) at a cinema showing. That’s profound.
And Tango & Cash (1989)?
It isn’t even a curiosity. It’s not even memorably rubbish, just pointless. And boring. A great nothing, it should be wiped from the historical record.
Bye for now.
This is a great movie because it achieves a rarity in cinema today.
You get sick to death of the characters and their antics but end up quite liking them because of the sincere, absolutely believable changes they make to stop being annoying.
Incredible scenes.
This director made some fucking belters, Seconds (1966) and Ronin (1998) your blogger’s personal faves from Frankenheimer’s treasure trove of thriller goodies.
The Train (1964) belongs in the wee basket of bantz. It features a train, didn’t you know? It’s a riot, with sublime cinematography replete with anachronistic experiments that somehow manage not to retract from the drama, the thrills, big Burt Lancaster, the rarely seen Paul Scofield as an art-loving Nazi, Jeanne Moreau, and lots of steam. Good steam.
John Frankenheimer made the type of movies that Brian De Palma couldn’t accomplish.
