..I figured Mickey Rourke, Anthony Hopkins, Mimi Rogers .. all great actors, great to look at. This is one of the few movies where you could almost see the actors looking at each other as if to say, "god, we suck!". I blame the script first and foremost, and secondarily Cimino. But you're guess is as good as mine as to what went wrong here. But it sure did. A four.
shareWell, most of the time Cimino can make a film that's badly written play better than it should thanks to his astute visual sense, but being that most of the film takes place inside a plain-looking house, there isn't much opportunity for Cimino to show his stuff -- though the demise of David Morse, whistling in a stream surrounded by the police, is dandy.
shareAgreed. The film could've had potential but the execution was faulty. Some of the acting was rather weak, and the script had so many credibility holes a Mac truck could've run through them. The family was way too bland for me. A product of the time period or something. Mickey Rourke, Mimi Rogers and Anthony Hopkins tried to deliver some legitimacy to the product but kept ramming their heads against the wall. From a writing standpoint, the setting was limited to the house which hindered it a lot. The film should've examined in the beginning why Bosworth was considered dangerous instead of being told that repeatedly. The Cornells needed an edge, like Hopkins having a shady past or Rogers with a secret of her own. The law enforcement was every Hollywood cliche in the book. The FBI agent tried to talk one of those femme fatales from noir films, except her voice was like nails on a chalk board. Despite all of this, the film had some chuckles for me, good and bad ones of course. Oh well, I guess another Hollywood opportunity wasted.
Score: 3.5
"I outrank you." Brad Chase
"And I'm such a slut for authority." Alan Shore
I saw this film with a friend of mine when it was originally released in the theater way back when. I've fortunately blanked it out for the most part but I do remember that we both thought it was so horrible that we were laughing hysterically in the parking lot on the way to our car just making fun of how awful and ridiculous it was. Easily as bad as Howard the Duck.
shareThe problem was it was a version of the Idiot Plot, which requires everyone to act like an idiot so the movie can continue.
shareFor me, I don't think it's a case of it being particularly bad as much as it was a case of expecting a lot more considering who was involved. Rourke, Hopkins and Rogers are all very capable actors. The same can be said for much of the supporting cast. Cimino was certainly a talented and capable director (even the much-maligned Heaven's Gate contains elements of greatness). Maybe it was too much to expect all this talent to elevate a story that was fairly predictable; it's the kind of plot that one expects of a tv-movie-of-the-week...or a Lifetime Movie. All the interesting camera shots, graphic violence and the caliber of the cast were kind of wasted on the pedestrian content.
share"The problem was it was a version of the Idiot Plot, which requires everyone to act like an idiot so the movie can continue."
Thank you, Roger Ebert.
I'm happiest...in the saddle.
Well, at the point in his career, Anthony Hopkins wasn't yet ANTHONY HOPKINS. This was a year prior to Silence of the Lambs, and his successive run to a handful of Oscar nods in the 90s. He wasn't nearly as famous in 1990. In actuality, Rourke and Rogers had already been in bigger hits than Hopkins at that point. Obviously, Hopkins was a great actor even then, but I think this was the first time he was working with a big-name director, at least in American film. He was doing much smaller, independent film and also TV movies in the 80s mostly.
What went wrong is the direction and writing, but the acting is pretty bad, considering the cast. But when a movie is this bad overall, most of the blame has got to go to the director!