As bad as it gets

Rating: 1/10 (9 July 2003)

This is one really bad movie. Unless you enjoy mindless and tasteless gore as entertainment, do not waste your time watching this.
The ridiculous tone as the movie is set during the opening sequence where emotionless children watch their parents being literally butchered. It carries on up to the final battle, where Amsterdam's last stab triggers a geyser of blood that sprays Di Caprio from head to toe. In between, the movie is a terribly boring collection of predictable, useless and at times completely wasted violence. The overload of violence completely fails to grip you as it is defeated by countless details that make it pathetically unbelievable - like Di Caprio's fresh skin two scenes after having is face marked with a red hot iron. There is no comfort to find in the razor thin plot, which is unveiled in the first minutes, nor in the characters, who are all competing for a spot on the bottom step of the morality ladder, nor in the dialogs, which are empty.
I watched this movie until the end hoping that it would at some point generate some emotions, but it didn't. The movie actually gets surprisingly worse towards then end when the historical events of the draft insurrection are slapped on like a slide show as to compensate for the lack of plot. The only thing that gripped me until the end was my amazement at how poor all of this was.
It is amazing indeed to think that $100M were spent to realize such a piece of garbage. And it is even more amazing that Hollywood dares to present this to us as entertainment and profit from it. It is a shame for the Academy Awards to have nominated this film 10 times. It is a shame for Mr. Scorcese to have wasted such a great subject and such great acting talent.