ulthar
Frightening Fanatic of Horrible Cinema
Karma: 368
Posts: 4168
I AM serious, and stop calling me Shirley
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« on: June 15, 2008, 10:36:21 PM » |
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In my opinion, this movie SUCKED. Big time. My wife agrees.
The basic set-up is awesome. Two brothers (Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman), both needing cash in a bad way for different reasons, hatch a scheme to rob their parent's jewelry store. That goes badly, and the aftermath propels them into increasing conflict with not only each other, but with their Father.
Sound interesting? Well, the execution was boring. As in dull. The same stinking stuff repeated 3-4 times (from different perspectives), plot points that are set-up as major then go nowhere and tangential scenes that take FOREVER (or so it seems) that have NOTHING to do with the story all add up to one huge temple rending headache by the time you reach the end of it's 2 hour runtime.
I like John Lasseter's theory on making a film. Story first, and every frame of the film should push the story forward. Sydney Lumet, who has helmed some truly great films in his career, seems to have forgotten that movies should tell a story. Too artsy.
This movie ended up being about Hoffman's "Andy" and his father's relationship. "Daddy did not love me enough growing up, and now that my life sucks, it's all his fault." Throw in some drugs, a crazed killing rampage and a wife who is sleeping around, and you STILL have a boring movie.
I'm still trying to get my mind around why in the world this movie needed to be longer than about 15 minutes. Really, there were a TON of scenes in this movie that just had NO POINT, ultimately.
For example, a CD left in a rental car by the bad guy who helps with the robbery is set up as a major plot point. Hank (Hawke) knows it's there, but lies to Andy about it. Hank gets a call to retrieve it from the car agency...goes to get it, the guy who called is not there, so Hank has to go back another day. In the meantime, someone took Hank's driver's license, so when he finally gets the car place to get the disk, he does not have ID. Oh wait, yes he does...he can use the credit card used to rent the car.
NONE of the this meant ANYTHING to the point of the movie. We're talking 10-15 minutes of screentime completely wasted on this stupid CD issue. All the time, I figured it was going to have something to do with the cops tracking down who was behind the robbery....
Oh, I guess in Lumet's world, the cops don't investigate jewelry store robberies that involve double murder. Because the cops were non-existent. The most basic, simplest investigative tool is to determine who a dead guy was with in the last hours/days of his life. Apparently, that was never done, here, because the dead guy's girlfriend (who knew he was with Hank right before the robbery took place) never 'fingered' Hank to the cops.
Mindboggling.
Equally mindboggling is the 'stellar' reviews of 10 stars this pile of steaming crap gets over on IMDB (not my basis for a rental...I got it cuz I thought the plot synopsis on Netflix looked interesting and I like both Hawke and Hoffman's work in other films).
The acting was solid, and that's about all I can say good about this movie. Well, and Lumet's composition. There was some interesting camera work.
1 out of 5
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