A haunting role from Christopher Walken, and just before he became a pop culture icon in addition to actor. You just feel sorry for him in this movie, with the foreboding he is totally doomed, such is the tension and supreme creepiness of the atmosphere. And for a David Cronenberg picture, it’s relatively tame, with none of the visceral gore and unsavoury preoccupation with flesh (mostly rotting) that characterises his earlier work.
The always captivating Herbert Lom shines, and Martin Sheen is a Grade A sleaze.
Seen this four times now. It is impeccable and unexpectedly … devastating. I HOPED (to justify my hatred of the worst of mannered British cinema) this upstairs/downstairs malarkey to be balls but, oh no.
Dr. L, sorry, Anthony Hopkins is an astounding thesp when he can be arsed and this wonderful film displays all of his gifts, how he can inject such a pitiful figure with pathos and something hidden but not quite revealed. What a heartless bastard this bloke is, dedicated to his duty – for folk who don’t give a tuppence about their servants’ well-being or advancement/adventures. He doesn’t know what else to do and it is purgatory witnessing it.
The Emma Thompson big-cheese housekeeper goes all-out to show how much she admires him and he is oblivious – what an infuriating fool of a character, but it’s explained why he is that way. He gets there in the end. Painfully.
Tragedy in the best way. Get the tissues out.
And also, Fred Elliott from Corrie Street (1066-the end of the world as we know it) pops up as a district nurse in a tuxedo.
The opening voice-over reeked of amateurishness – John Lithgow narrating shots of our heroes playing football, describing a wee bit of superfluous info about them all – so I turned it off and watched a documentary about the bomber instead.
I wish this would have just been about the Battle of Waterloo (1815) as it’s the only time this movie truly ignites, and that’s despite the battlefield inaccuracies and the atrocious performance of Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington, the ’90s throwback playing Wellesley as a snarling thug rather than aristocratic master of defensive battle.
The first 45 minutes are great, Napoleon awestruck by Joséphine and proceeding to act in the most hilariously childlike manner, a supreme baby smitten. It’s very funny and it’s a shame it didn’t stay this way, a couple’s domestic melodrama taken to the extremes of the world stage. Unfortunately, what follows is a series of scenes from your basic high school history lesson with nothing holding them together. Don’t expect a character study but a truncated telling of events. It’s an enigmatic performance from Phoenix and he’s always engrossing; the drama, however, is zilch.
Hurried, unfocused, and often boring, it’s a technical marvel with sumptuous visuals but a decent script would have helped. There’s no sense of the wider historical forces that enabled or expanded the Napoleonic Wars, or any concerted attempt to explore the lad’s mammoth fall. Here, it just … happens.
I’ll wait for the four-hour cut I keep hearing about.
I mind this being “hilarious” back in the day. I think I might have lost my mind. It’s a rubbish piece of work, barely funny, and just nasty. Some of the lines are shocking, the story is ludicrous, and there is an unbearable air of smugness to it all. The cast are also insufferable, really mediocre actors. Oh, we had a wild night and that’s somehow rib-splitting. Grow up. Plonkers.
More valuable than most with its refreshing insight into procedural techniques, and it doesn’t delve much into the cultural appeal of Gotti at the time of his Al Capone status; why bother to dissect the masses’ tendency to elevate cunts into heroes? This creative decision was a relief (we could be here all fucking day).
I liked it mainly because the makers have clearly fashioned the music, the titles, the cinematography … the whole works on Drive (2011). That’s funny. I can picture the production team sitting down to watch the Gosling (birthing into ‘Gosling’) picture and concluding, “Our three-part series shall be Drive with a voice-over.”
The brawls were okay but this was mostly a bore. The original video game spin-off from 1995 is cheesy hokum but it’s at least memorable. The characters in that pile of dirge hardly have dimensions but their one-liners make them stand out. That and you’ve got the techno soundtrack.
This was dull. And full of needless swearing which quickly tires.
I desperately wanted to like this one and did everything to try and absorb something from it but I was sadly … fucking bored from start to end. It was hard work making it to the finish line and my relief at the concluding credits was not something I was expecting.
I found it all a bit tiresome, safe, unadventurous, and wholly unmemorable. I seeked out indelible shots and sequences but couldn’t find any. The characters were too insipid to care about. The score irritated me. And we then get yet another courtroom closure. I can’t think of anything else to remark upon and doubt I will. I’ll never watch this film again.
Warwick Davis and a pre-Friends (one would hope) Jennifer Aniston in a movie called Leprechaun which is incidentally about a leprechaun on a murderous rampage. I can’t believe at times that these flicks exist and haven’t been erased from history, but here we are. Today, in our distorted, feverish universe of … wokeness, you wouldn’t have a midget playing a leprechaun. There would be uproar, short and tall people picketing screenings because a midget is playing a midget with bad tendencies. But then you’d get the same if the leprechaun would be CGI. “Midgets deserve work.”
Anyway, it’s rubbish. It is, after all, about a leprechaun on the loose.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 