F. Murray Abraham


Oscar-worthy performance.

He plays the self-righteous, casually cruel megalomaniac perfectly. You also see the false flair for the dramatic of these kinds of people. Should have won an oscar.

"The devil I renounce is you, Bernardo Gui!"

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FMA is one of my favorite actors, so I'm pretty biased, but I loved him in this movie. Totally agree with you.

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I was expecting him to come in and steal all the scenes he's in (like in Amadeus) but to my huge surprise he was the worst actor in the movie for me. He was acting too much "theatrically". Too much like a Disney villain (those eyebrows didn't help either). And the psychology of his character is non existent. He's an a-hole because he's an a-hole.
They could have added some depth to his character by making him actually believe in the punishment as necessary to bring God back. Instead, he looked like he came to do a trial before lunch so he was trying to get it over asap.
Instead of being dangerous because he was a mad zealot or a disappointed version of Connery's character or just a cynical bureaucrat who does it because he was told to do so, he was simply a vain sadist who abuses church's power - a pure caricature. We already covered that very well with the Rome's emissaries, thank you very much.

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Agreed! He was amazing in this movie!

Prostitute: What the *beep* are you doing?
Johnny: I'm gonna kill a bunch of people.

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I don't really agree. Actually I thought he was the weakest link in this movie. I mean, he was adequate, but not great. Everyone else was great, but he was only adequate. He felt out of place somehow, like he was superimposed in a setting where he doesn't belong. He doesn't work as a medieval character, in my opinion, and not just because he was so obviously American in a movie where almost everyone else was European (Christian Slater was American too, but less obviously so I think; I think he did a better job of absorbing himself into the setting, and I would never have known that the hunchback Salvatore was played by an American if the cast list didn't tell me so). I really think a different actor would have been better.

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I agree, he was just a stereotypical villain.

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