Not Enjoyable at All

Rating: 4/10 (20 June 2003)

It disturbs me that a lot of these 10/10 reviews rave on about the "ultraviolence" and sex. Now I do not have a problem with art - I have no problem with realistic portrayal either - but to extol the art of a film because it is violent or has sexual content, debases the people who do so into carnal savages.
Is it so wrong that in the 21st Century, with all the misery and destruction, that we learn to elevate our culture and society to have some self-respect and compassion? Evidently when someone gleefully watches "A Clockwork Orange" delving delightfully in its violence, that being a better person isn't a virtue worth striving for for that person.
On to the movie review: Malcolm McDowell plays one of the most hateable characters I've ever watched - and one can only naturally congratulate Malcolm for his acting talent. However, the rest of the film is only average. Perhaps in the 70s it may have been brilliant for the cinematography but I find the themes very basic. There's certainly nothing extraordinary about this film at all. Stories like "1984" or "Metropolis" would be considered brilliant in conception and vision, but "A Clockwork Orange" has nary a thought that would cause one to pause more than a second of afterthought. The concept of removing one's free will to do evil was very poorly conveyed and it never once caused me to ponder it.
I just get this feeling that there is really nothing great about this film at all, and so all these animalistic fans of violence-for-the-sake-of-violence make up all these so-called qualities for this film just to pad their reviews so it's not so obvious how so lacking in substance this film really is. A film like "Brazil" for instance, covers the themes of "A Clockwork Orange" so brilliantly that one thinks about how it relates to society. "A Clockwork Orange" does nothing to relate to the real world since it poorly relates anything except for some brute violence. Whoopie-doo.
In fact the only thing that makes fans of this film rave on about this film is the violence and the fact that it was banned. Yawn. Let's move on shall we? 4/10