Prefer to, at a Much Later Time!

Rating: 4/10 (23 May 2020)

"This is crazy," says Anthony Hopkins's character Bill Parrish, a billionaire media mogul to titular character Joe Black, at a fairly early stage of this extraordinarily long remake of the clever, 1934 relatively short film, Death Takes a Holiday. He already knew something many viewers probably didn't. They were in for a very extended, lengthy, muddled ride watching a hugely tedious, undramatic and unromantic film, whereby Death (Joe Black - Brad Pitt) drops into the Land of the Free, to be tutored in ways human, by Bill Parrish and later, his lovely daughter Susan.
Producer/director Martin Brest had a relatively brief ride amongst the Hollywood elites. He made 2 very good action comedies, Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run and an OK drama, in Scent of a Woman, all consecutively. From there, starting from this film it was all downhill, ending terminally with the catastrophic Gigli. He hasn't really been heard from since. All the signs pointing to a decline are on show here in this ponderous, pretentious affair.
For a start considering it was made in 1998 for a then, pretty staggering $90 million, it's one of those productions where you just can't see where the money has gone. It does have some opulent sets and locations in a Rhode Island mansion, but so do other films with much smaller budgets. Salaries? Reshoots? I don't know, but unsurprisingly it was a troubled shoot.
It has 2 extremely bankable stars in Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt. Hopkins is as serviceable as ever and undoubtedly would entertain reading a telephone directory. Pitt is not miscast, but I feel hopelessly misdirected. He is asked to play Death as this naive, virginal, neophyte, when the opposite, most certainly could have applied. The eternal Grim Reaper should have been seen as being the epitome of intelligence, charm and attractive menace, especially after his early library introduction with Parrish, when he is invisible. This results in a couple of hours of "awkward" between Pitt and co-star Claire Forlani (who really tries her hardest) as Susan, instead of rebirthing the sexy chemistry, we'd been led to believe had been established by the earlier cafe scenes. And speaking of "awkward", how about that absurd road accident? Junkies, drunks, fugitives from the law maybe, but sane individuals don't stand in the middle of a busy road, completely love-struck and wait patiently to be run over.
There are sub-plots; which have all the repetition and dramatic heft of your regular daytime TV soaps. I'd like a dollar for every time we saw Pitt and Hopkins standing/sitting bemusedly in a board room meeting in Meet Joe Black. And Marcia Gay Harden's character of Allison, Susan's sister, is (for a 3 hour film), ironically underwritten and generally ill-used.
Laughably Martin Brest apparently took offence at some of the airlines and TV stations who tried to do him a favour and did their own 2 hour edits of the movie. Seems he was incapable of picking up the message that there may have been a few decent ideas in Meet Joe Black that should have been delivered in a more simple and lean package.