Fantastic Film

Rating: Null/10 (28 April 2002)

*BIG SPOILERS AHEAD*
This film is an epic and a classic. It is sad, occasionally funny, and always captivating. Every single character is brilliantly acted, and the viewer feels something whenever one of them is killed. At one point, the psychotic Tommy shoots a young kid called Spider in the foot for being to slow with their drinks. Some days later, Spider stands up for himself and tells Tommy to ''go f**k himself''. Tommy's friends treat this as a joke and congratulate Spider. The atmosphere is very jokey, until Tommy shoots the young man dead. This was one of the saddest moments in the film. One of the most brilliant moments is when Tommy, thinking that he is about to get made, walks into a room and realises that he is about to get killed in revenge for someone he brutally murdered earlier in the film. All the usually foul mouthed Tommy says in the brief period between realising and getting killed is ''oh, no''. Another brilliant part of the film is how Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro in an excellent performance) turns gradually from a likeable character into a man who kills almost all of his 'friends'. Another sad scene is when the police find various bodies, killed by Jimmy after the heist, while Eric Clapton's 'Layla' plays in the background. Drugs are eventually Henry's downfall, leading the police to him. Henry rats on his friends Paulie and Jimmy, for whom we don't feel nearly as sorry as we would have if he had ratted on them at the beginning of the movie. He is put in the FBI Witness Relocation Program, and so ends one of the best films in recent years, as Henry, a scared man, goes out in the morning in his nightgown to collect the paper, haunted by a vision of the dead Tommy shooting him. AMAZING FILM.