From The Director Who Brought You Gigli

Rating: 3/10 (15 December 2004)

An acquaintance recently insisted that I watch Meet Joe Black, his favorite movie and one that he was sure would change my life. I remembered it as being a critically reviled movie that prompted one of two responses  it's so bad it's good, or it's so bad it'sjust bad.
Meet Joe Black is quite possibly one of the worst movies that I've ever had to endure. The script, or the mess that resulted from reassembling the shredded remains of a dozen rewrites, was so bad as to be funny. On several occasions, my wife and I laughed out loud at the mock sincerity and vapid attempts at 'meaning' and 'depth'. The entire thing sounds like the laughable doom laden poetry of a maudlin teenager. The actors, left with nothing of any substance to work with, and operating under a director who clearly has intellectual aspirations far above his capabilities, struggle to create characters that amount to anything more than shameless pouting and vacant stares into the middle distance.
Buried beneath the portentous dialogue, the awkward performances, the dull production design and wildly inconsistent storyline, there IS a kernel of a decent story. Had we been able to focus on Joe Black and follow his own emotional journey as he weaves between the variously dysfunctional members of the Parrish family, playing with the irony of death healing these people's wounds, something of value may have resulted, but alas, it's not to be. Even my wife, a hardcore fan of every romance put to screen, found the whole thing to swing wildly from embarrassment to tedium.
The blame for this entire mess can only be laid at the feet of Martin Brest, a director of very little evident talent who created a reasonably enjoyable buddy cop movie 20 years ago and has been riding on the wake of it's success ever since. He should stop deluding himself, his actors and audiences, that he is capable of subtlety or intelligence. Hopefully, Gigli will be the death of him.
As for a rating, let's give it a 3 out of 10, out of respect for capable actors put in an impossible situation.