Good story, lousy film

Rating: 5/10 (29 September 2002)

A Clockwork Orange has achieved legendary status, but for the life of me I cannot figure out why. The original story by Anthony Burgess strives to make an important Orwellian statement about the perils of allowing society to override peoples' free will for the common good. But the production of this film is so irretrievably dated and incoherent that the moral is almost entirely lost in a bizarre mix of stylish ultraviolence and unrefined cheese. Take Stanley Kubrick's name off the credits and its almost a certainty that the gang at Mystery Science Theater would have had a field day with this overrated dud.
Granted, the nudity, sex and violence must have been shocking in 1971, and shock can make a point. These scenes are commonplace today, however, and there lies the main reason that this film seems forever trapped in 1971: it relies entirely on shock value to make its point, yet the scenes in this film are no longer shocking. In too many ways, they are disturbingly silly.
For all the talk about Kubrick's "brilliant" ironic juxtaposition of beautiful classical music against the ugliness of violence, most of the soundtrack sounds like it was created by an escapee from the primate sanctuary who entered the sound studios of Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of..." and began pounding away at the Mini-Moog.
Unlike Kubrick's timeless masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange looks like it was already seriously dated by the end of the year it was released, even though the story apparently takes place well in the future. So much bad hair, pre-disco costuming and overtly sexual "modern" art makes one think of Andy Warhol far more than George Orwell, adding a buffoonish quality to what should have been a serious story.
And unless Kubrick expected that Americans would never see this film, one has to wonder why the speech almost entirely consists of slurred, sloppy British slang to the point where one requires English subtitles to get anywhere beyond the gist of what is being said in this English-speaking film.
My apologies to those who love A Clockwork Orange, but it really isn't a very good film. It's sad enough when art achieves immortality through style rather than substance. But when even the cheesy style upon which a work of art's immortality is based has long since become a historical embarrassment, we have to start looking for psychological reasons why this film remains so popular.