Somehand please hand me a revolver

Rating: 2/10 (17 December 2003)

I just would not know whether to use it on myself, or on the characters on the screen. This movie is awful. It is poorly written, badly acted and unbelievable from the get-go. It seems that our friends in South America may agree with me, based on some of the comments I've read. I really wanted to like this movie--some of the best reviews of the year, I think Tim Robbins is great, I enjoy most of Clint Eastwood's films as director (with the exception of another overrated pile of rubbish, Unforgiven). POSSIBLE SPOILERS: Sean Penn and Robbins' characters are supposed to be as close as brothers, so the finale by the river was just not believable. And what exactly was Laura Linney's character cause for her sudden amount of hatred towards Robbins' character? The inclusion of Kevin Bacon's and Lawrence Fishburn's characters were distractions, at best, and did not do anything for the story. Now I have no problems with downbeat movies that require an amount of thinking by the viewers (examples of recent movies in this category that I really enjoyed are Requiem for a Dream, The Ice Storm, and Happiness). But I don't enjoy movies that shamelessly manipulate the audience into caring about characters with no appealing attributes and are unconvincingly portrayed and caricatures at best. The "great" acting in this movie consists of the actors breaking down in tears every five minutes or so. And the Boston accents--just ridiculous. Especially Laura Linney's. So I'll close this by saying that, on the plus side, the direction is rather good (although I still prefer the understated direction Eastwood used in his recent movies like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and older ones like Play Misty for Me). I still have a lot of respect for the actors, despite their performances in this movie--but I'd like to see Sean Penn get nominated for something totally out of character for him (heck, I preferred him in I Am Sam over this). Save your money.