The biggest compliment I can bestow here is that Bradley Cooper isn’t annoying for one time only.
In addition to this magisterial feat, it’s a movie about misery that’s somehow captivating, and the third act is rather breathtaking in its audacity.
We have a proper movie on our hands.
A bombastic scene-setting voice-over braces the audience for a long-haul melodrama of middling attributes.
The poster for this film couldn’t be more ’90s with the leads glaring, almost begging us lot to pay the price of admission. It was Brad Pitt mania so the box-office returns were handsome, just like the movie’s primary stud with his L’Oréal locks that would make David Ginola envious.
Julia Ormond from First Knight (1995) is in it, which was a wee surprise as I thought she was in that solitary film before vanishing like a fart in the wind (sorry, Bob Gunton). Sadly, she is wasted here playing an upper-crust village bicycle who goes through the three brothers like wildfire. And Anthony Hopkins, playing the pops, has another strange accent but that’s his modus operandi.
This is one of those movies that must have been pitched as ‘SWEEPING EPIC’, which it is, with complementary James Horner score, which it has.
But none of it is any good.
Pathetic, absolutely futile cinema, I was convinced for a torrid opening 20 minutes that this putrid imitator was an AI … thing. Embarrassingly, it’s a verbatim rendering of the first one, with an added siege lifted from Game of Thrones season four, episode nine.
In what passes for a story, which is an appropriation of better material out there, characters do and say the most trite things; there is even a rip-off of that scene from Ben Hur (1959) when creepy Jack Hawkins licks his lips at Charlton Heston’s oar action.
It’s a fucking ridiculously stupid, cynical, pointless and rubbish film and I can’t believe it was made.
Why does anyone still have dealings with this director? He needs banned from making movies.
Shite.
It’s still incredible and funny as hell. In fact, this may be the funniest non-comedy movie ever.
‘Why would I shoot a bloke – BANG – and then put him in the bloody car and whiz him off to the hospital at a hundred miles an hour? It defeats the purpose of having shot him in the first place. What’s more, it’s bloody insulting, it’s bloody insulting. I mean, am I the only bloody standover man in the country who provides a medical plan for some of these characters?’
The original, before Freddy was slapped on plastic lunch boxes – so the popular maxim goes.
No shortage of invention from Wes Craven in this and for even his slasher tripe he usually has a theme or two worth exploring or something on his mind, subtext channeling his psychological preoccupations of the time. On this occasion he is a prurient fellow, teenage kicks punished by a scarred lad with knives for fingers, and in dire need of a personal shopper (that sweatshirt).
The movie is mainly just a laugh, and the set pieces are there to be admired for their ingenuity. Scary? Nah, human behaviour at bus stops is scary. The self-scan in Aldi is scary. The fact that Phil Neville garnered 59 England caps = scary.
The most captivating aspect of this asinine waste of celluloid is that it somehow ‘created’ the PG-13 certificate. Apparently it was too violent. The flick has a legacy, as without this story it’s a forgotten VHS. It’s not violent, it’s just a terrible movie.
There is no sense of wonder at all and it’s burdened by so much inconsequential, incessant bickering between the leads that I thought I was viewing one of those candid cameras in an Aldi, two rat-faced porkers going at it over the last remnants of a pack of bog rolls.
Anyway, I’ve never seen an adventure movie so dull. Or pointless.
Every antagonist is a witless archetype, every utterance an insult to dialogue. The pacing is relentless in its monotony.
I was more captivated reading about the production of this slog on Wikipedia than viewing it.
I hate this film.
Avoid.
Presently watching Jurassic Park (1993).
Richard Attenborough’s ‘Scottish’ accent is even worse than Mel Gibson’s and Mrs. Doubtfire’s combined. After a litre of Aftershock between them.
I don’t even know what this accent is meant to be as I’ve never heard something like it before.
This movie is unique.
This was deeply uncomfortable to watch.
I know barely a thing about the people concerned but I felt like I was on the inside for the duration of the grisly unearthing of a sordid series of manky acts by one rotten creature. And an industry enabling it.
The movie is accomplished in this regard, though it was a box-office bomb (not exactly a shock) despite the talent involved.
Another example of journalism accomplishing what law enforcement should but does not.
Hell or High Water (2016) is very much the industry’s modern Western, luxuriating in a morbid obsession with the past and lost causes, the usual broken-home narrative and the criminals bred from it, a swipe at ruthless capitalism to boot.
But it looks outrageously cinematic, despite the galore of clichés on display. Jeff Bridges is in it and it’s his worse performance; he’s so grating I muted his dialogue and admired the visuals instead of listening to him. He’s some kind of revered ‘treasure’ these days and I have never understood it. He’s been phoning in his shaggy-dog act for two decades now and it’s sadly a guarantee you’ll have to endure this tired schtick in any movie he features in.
A shite actor of limited gifts in a good movie with better actors to salvage it. And your thrilling carnage.
And the incredible cinematography.
Few motion pictures from the oeuvre of Orson Welles can be presumed as being fully realised, such is the vivid literature of production chaos accompanying each project. We have anomalies in Citizen Kane (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958) – and this the 1998 re-release that celebrated technical whiz Walter Murch translated from Welles’ 58-page instructions. Every other movie from Welles is a mess, though usually a daring and admirable work.
The enfant terrible of a hundred biographies was indulged one time only; he seldom again had the money to finish productions, or manage them, or bring his visions to satisfactory fruition. It’s one of cinemas great tragedies and there are more than plenty. He exists in this liminal world of half-realised dreams, grandiose what-might-have-beens, stunted ambition, self-sabotage, a proclivity for playing Icarus.
And The Lady from Shanghai (1947)? It’s a hoot. Despite the confusing plot (probably by design), it is technically cutting edge, with Welles’ virtuoso camera taking us on a wild ride up there with the most lauded noirs of the era. A highly funny film that verges on self-parody, especially in the courtroom scenes, it’s as weird as a Welles movie gets.
Worth watching for his ‘Irish’ accent alone.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 