One of Scorsese's few misses.

Rating: 5/10 (8 January 2008)

Another painfully dull, formulaic, rise-and-fall story. It really adds nothing new or original to the genre and featured the most disgustingly overacted performance I've seen my entire life in the form of Sharon Stone. Also, any time a film relies 90% on narration just annoys me. If I wanted that much narration, I'd get a book. You should be able to convey your story through images and character dialogue, not a constant narration with little clips of what they're talking about scattered throughout. I give it some credit for completely kicking it up six notches in the final third of the film, though. It became so much more engaging and entertaining, and Pesci and De Niro both fine tuned their performances. James Woods was also very fun to watch, but was criminally underused.