Visual masturbation.

Rating: 6/10 (25 July 2003)

As good as the direction was, I felt that I was alternately either watching a mid 1800's version of either Mad Max or A Clockwork Orange.
The story was a fairly straight-forward revenge tale. Unlike many other commentators, I liked the Di Caprio character and thought he did a good job (which is saying a lot for me, since Titanic is one of my most hated movies of all time and I despise anyone involved in that project) and felt D.D. Lewis was doing a bad De Niro impression the whole movie. To his credit, he was semi-creepy (mostly due to the handlebar moustache though), but whatever he was doing with his voice ... it was cheeseball. Cameron Diaz was miscast, but I didn't mind it much since it at least gave me something to look at while I was trying to stay awake. The plot and story were nothing to write home about, and the movie was about half an hour too long for the lack of substance it had.
The extreme liberties on historical accuracy also were annoying to me, especially since the movie played itself off as being at least somewhat historically accurate (for example the fades to New York in its current real state at the end of the movie, as if the two were even from the same universe much less one evolving from the other). I'm a fairly cynical member of society (left winger and an atheist), but the continual mockings of democracy, voting, value of human life, religion,etc besides just plain getting old quickly also came off as needlessly cynical untruths. If the movie was going for any real insights into early American life/thinking they failed miserably.

6/10 more because most movies are junk rather than this one being particularly good.

On the plus side, I'm off now to watch A Clockwork Orange again. Kubrick makes Martin S. look like an amateur with this type of material.