Reviews

While I'm sure its target audience, those who are already familiar with the source material, will probably enjoy this movie, for those of us in the mainstream, the whole thing comes across as a poorly thought out political screed. There's unexplained jargon thrown around, massive plot holes (the economy has collapsed, yet Vegas is still full of green grass? One of the least hospitable environments for such?), and a general tedium. The whole thing is clearly aimed strictly at its believers, or maybe those involved were so close to the material that they couldn't see the problems. Sorbo is properly credited as a lead, not just a day or two of filming, but most of the acting is passable, at best. Apologies for the lack of details, but I saw this a few months ago, and the finer points have mercifully faded from memory.

I got a free ticket to see this, and spent too much. The credits did not appear until the end of the movie, and that made it much clearer what was going on: There were a few names and surnames repeated several times in the credits, none of them well known as filmmakers. The director was listed as a main designer for the car that was featured, at length -- not that it was particularly interesting as a car. Or a movie; the whole thing is padded absurdly. There might be a decent half-hour TV show buried in this mess, but the fact that there's almost a half hour of setup before anything really happens is a giveaway of the pace of this thing. And once things start happening, they look like something from the 80's -- at best. Nothing happens fast, and almost nothing happens only once; the director liked some of his shots so much we see them several times. Even the scene after the credits is pointless.

Don't get me wrong -- I like outsider films. The original Gone in 60 Seconds, for example, is a classic. This has none of the pacing or wit of that movie, or any other decent one.

And nothing else I say will probably be deemed relevant, since I'm over the target age of this movie (even though I've liked some of Tom Green's other work). In fact, those technical virtues, plus one laugh near the end from a placard in a crowd scene, are the reason I didn't give this a vote of 1.

As momma always said, if you can't say something nice...

I'm fortunate: I went to a press screening, so I didn't contribute to the box office take of this opus, which gives me a somewhat clear conscience.

Sadly, most of the major comic sequences were in the trailer. Since I had seen the trailer a number of times before the movie, this dulled the impact of the jokes in the movie for me.

If I hadn't seen the trailer, I expect I would have been on the floor during the movie. As it was, I only managed a few laughs.

Sadly, even the adult we're supposed to like (William) isn't too likeable, but fortunately the kids are. Well acted (again, especially by the teens) and affecting, though the family doesn't seem as screwed up as the one in Buffalo '66. Those looking for a straightforward script that resolves everything logically will be disappointed.

Cracking yarn. And decent swordplay as well. Not to mention great sex appeal in Banderas and Zeta-Jones. Best to ignore the comical attempts to make Hopkins look younger in the prologue...

As a paranoia thriller, this mostly works as far as it goes, but it really needed more depth to the plot to sustain a feature. Everyone involved milked what was there for all it was worth, but there wasn't enough there.

All the good jokes were in the trailer. This movie had a couple of good ideas, but the sustained parody of Casino gets in the way of the jokes.

Memo to Mr. Korine: a movie should have something, whether it be plot, dialog, characters, or images, that is more interesting than a typical boring day in a typical boring life. If there was a point, it got left on the cutting room floor, where about half the footage here should have joined it. There were moments, but they were few and far between. Maybe the title is the point: we never saw Gummo Marx, and we never should have seen this movie.

Highly stylized, and a good (if somewhat dated) plot, but the studio-imposed ending is a disappointment, and clearly not a typical Hitchcock tone.