go meet someone else

Rating: 5/10 (4 November 1999)

Oh dear, nightmare.
Personifications of death crop up quite a lot in cinema, but in my view seldom with so little effect as here.
I join with everyone else in being delighted by the "coffee shop" scene at the start. But after that, we have a slothful grind through some suspect acting and a plot (and sub-plots) which defy belief even in the context of a film based on death taking a holiday in the US.
Clare Forlani is of course not offensive to the eye, but I did worry about her repertoire of acting techniques. To cheer you up during your nye-on 3 hour sitdown, I suggest you count the number of times she stares at Pitt or Hopkins as they talk, then looks away to stare into the middle distance, gulps and nods rapidly a couple of times. Presumably that was doing "sensitive and vulnerable", but after a few repeats I didn't really care.
Pitt, well, less said the better about his attempts for much of the film at imitating the lobotomised bloke in "Planet of the Apes". And Hopkins does what he can, but is stuffed by having to play the straight man in a comedy double act with robot-boy.
I was fed this as an in-flight movie after I had seen it once in the cinema, it's an hour shorter, a mercy in itself, but the scenes which are cut leaves it even more confused. Almost everything about Hopkins' business activities goes out the window, along with the best (only) one-liner in the film.
The film may be good for people who have missed the difference between sentimentality and romance and I would recommend it to them. But for me, this film was dead on arrival. Inquest verdict: misadventure.