Neither Masterpiece Nor Disaster

Rating: 7/10 (15 July 2011)

Seems like opinion is of 2 camps: it's an unsung masterpiece, or an utter disaster. Why can't the truth lie in between? Film is long, but not as slow as I'd heard - there's a lot of story. And some of the sequences are just fantastic; also there's more humor than you'd expect. Still it all adds up to little. The film doesn't particularly make you think, and it sure as hell doesn't make you care.
The problem is Barry/O'Neill at the center of it is vacuous, vaguely unlikeable and unforgivably dumb. By the end I was kind of rooting for him to get shot. I love O'Neill in "Paper Moon" & "What's Up Doc," but he's so horribly miscast here it's painful. I was racking my brains to think of who could have played Barry and concluded it was a shame Daniel Day Lewis hadn't been discovered just a few years earlier to do it. It's a fun party game, but just a shame. No doubt a different Barry would have made it a different and likely better movie.
I somehow doubt that this was Mr. Kubrick's intention, but my main takeaway was that men are basically pretty awful, ugly, brutish animals with bulging, ungainly pouches in their pants. Not that the women come off much better, but they get a lot less screen time.