This was inordinately entertaining and galling and frankly nuts and by the last 30 minutes unwatchable, so draining I had to turn it off. There’s only so much of this lad you can take.
The Roy Cohn Playbook seems to work in this lopsided political sphere. And it’s been appropriated by thousands of pygmy politicians.
I’m sure that was the point of this riotous slog of a movie.
Another episode from the post-Se7en (1995) slew of crap, there isn’t much happening here but lengthy periods of fatigue. Cary Elwes is in it and he’s fucking awful, but that’s no surprise in a movie bereft of surprises.
Pish.
Even a funny Anthony Hopkins can’t salvage this bombastic, pompous shitter that is by far the most boring film I’ve seen this year. Hopkins, playing a demented King Herod with an insatiable lust for life, knows it’s a joke of a film so decides to deliver some hammy lolz in exchange for his no doubt sizeable cheque.
And why not? Keep ’em coming, Mr. Hopkins.
It’s a rare movie that successfully depicts a vision of the future within an identifiable present you can recognise. It’s funny, a Utopian vision full of filth, Cruise graduating from the pristine confines of a police department to accidentally munching on a 12- year-old sandwich unearthed from Peter Stormare’s fridge.
Scarily accurate in its technological predictions, and the overarching powers of police surveillance in the age of preemptive strike, it’s a sad shame the script lifts verbatim a crucial scene from L.A. Confidential (1997). Flattery, or just lazy writing?
And the ending is embarrassing to watch, the cringe enduring image of three clairvoyants in old codger jumpers, reading books in a cottage, with a corny Cruise voice-over explaining why they are there.
It should have concluded with a bit more of the weirdness and ambiguity of Philip K. Dick.
Watching this again was a fatalistic regret because it’s absolute rubbish and bloody tedium defined. It’s another one of those movies that I convinced myself was good.
It isn’t and takes so long to get going I thought I was viewing one of those indulgent director’s cuts.
This funny flick (for the most part) revels in its own silly wee world and knows how ridiculous it is.
Several chuckles along the way, even if the last 20 minutes are unbearable in their noisy-as-hell mindlessness, as if all the self-aware comedy was building to a doll on a dull rampage.
An outright entertainment and, let’s be fair, an out-and-out total fantasy, this sweet, wittier-than-most teen comedy features generally violence-free classrooms, with an almost respect and rapport between teachers and students. There is not even a hint of a mass shooting, and everyone is self-aware.
No teenagers are on the verge of being sectioned despite their peccadilloes, and we have Orbital’s ‘Halcyon On and On’ from Mortal Kombat (1995) finish proceedings, just to confirm this movie is all a fantasy.
A very fetching fantasy.
I was dreading this movie would be too reliant on the standard As Good as It Gets (1997) OCD schtick to drive the narrative but it smartly sidestepped all the easy mechanisms. A highly entertaining dramedy with two plots going on seamlessly, a con and a character study intertwined, this is another solid entry in the Cage compendium.
One wishes Ridley Scott would make inconsequential but breezy fare like this rather than all his insipid train wrecks of late, which are too numerous.
And Bruce McGill is in it, showing once again that he’s in everything.
This was just one unfathomably tedious exposition that never felt like going anywhere, and by the time the carnage commenced I patently couldn’t be arsed.
I must have sighed on a dozen occasions and this produced sighs from displeased persons in front of me, who evidently did not approve of my sighing.
Pish.
Michael Madsen seemed to exist in this liminal space between trash and art, or how sometimes they can be intertwined. And let’s not forget the unforgettable creation, the lad who had a predilection for slicing ears off.
Scary man!
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 