Boring, predictable, impossible

Rating: 4/10 (14 January 2003)

Perhaps this movie has a resonance for New Yorkers but I doubt it. Everything in it has been done before, the fight scenes in Braveheart, the son avenging his father's death (Hamlet anyone?). The scenery and costume but in Far and Away. The love interest. Diaz and Di Caprio are pretty but Di Caprio in particular can't act. Daniel Day Lewis sounds uncannily like Groucho Marx. The fact that he also looks a bit like him on screen makes it look comic to me.

Day Lewis' character is a one-eyed butcher who can throw knives with an accuracy better than a centimeter. This is impossible if you don't have stereo vision. Di Caprio's character claims that 15,000 Irish were arriving per week in the 1860s - I don't think so, perhaps one week during 1840s but not afterwards. Clearly not much research was done. It looks as if Scorses read up on lots of amazing facts about 19c New York and decided that they were all true and happened all the time.
By the end of the film I was cheering for the marines to massacre all these lawless savages.

Oh yes watch out for the CGI elephant at the end. Clearly Scorsese is aspiring to be operatic, but what we see is more like baudy, violent vaudeville.