i came home to find my roommate watching this on netflix and it was unbearable. i had to physically leave and go upstairs not to be confronted by this horrible film. This movie is the definition of cheese. It has an interesting cast, but everything just sucks about it. If i ever have to watch al pacino giving michelle phiefer the "hooAH" again then im gonna kill myself.
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I HAD to watch this film as my girlfriend wanted to see it so badly. I couldn't stand it, but I just hung in there the best I could. This was over 20 years ago and I've only watched the movie once, but I still remember the cringe inducing dialog. I thought the part where Al calls the radio station to tell the announcer that he and his girlfriend are named "Frankie and Johnny" to the disbelief of the announcer. I mean, WHY didn't the announcer believe him? There was absolutely no reason for the radio guy to state that he "knew when someone was pulling his leg". For some reason, that part just made me hate this piece of crap even more. This movie is in my ABSOLUTELY FVCKIN' HATE FILMS, second only to "The Upside of Anger".
shareI HAD to watch this film as my girlfriend wanted to see it so badly. I couldn't stand it, but I just hung in there the best I could. This was over 20 years ago and I've only watched the movie once, but I still remember the cringe inducing dialog.
I have to agree. The premise of the film (Pacino's ex-con cook romancing Pfeiffer's waitress) had potential and I like the way the film captures the hectic atmosphere of New York, but it left me very disappointed.
The biggest issue was the script. It's very disjointed and repetitive. We see endless scenes of Frankie and Johnny first talking, then getting together, fighting, etc and there was no logical flow to the scenes (they're just stuck together with no narrative coherence). As a result the film just dragged and became a chore to watch. I didn't even finish the film as a result.
I also didn't buy the central romance. Pacino's character is supposed to be an ex-con but we never feel shades of his former life coming out; he just seems like an oddball stalker following Pfieffer around. Pfiffer isn't given much to do but mope around and she's way too beautiful to be convincing as a lonely waitress working at a diner. It's a shame considering the two leads worked well in Scarface, but here they don't have much to work with given a lousy script.
Hey, I don't fault you at all for not liking the movie, but if you are going to criticize omissions from the movie, it's probably a good idea to finish the film. If you had finished the film, you would have seen the explanation for his ex-con background not playing a major role that you were asking about. He was in for forgery, not murder or anything like that. So his character had questionable ethics, but he wasn't entirely dangerous or horrible. You can kind of see how his character would be in prison for something like forgery or money laundering instead of something like murder/assault or rape. He was a bit manipulative and under-handed in trying to get what he wanted, but he was also ultimately gentle and not a mean-hearted person. They left his reveal of that side of him to her for the end for dramatic impact and tension. She had felt he was hiding something for much of the film and called him out on it towards the end of the movie.
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