Marty has gone bats

Rating: 1/10 (21 February 2010)

Scorsese hit his peak with Raging Bull and it has been downhill ever since. Teaming up with Leo instead of keeping the franchise going with De Niro (OK, he's old but he can still act) was a major mistake. Gangs of NY? A snoozer except for Bill the Butcher; the Departed, overrated, now this turkey.
My wife and I were laughing out loud at Marty's lame attempts to emulate the master, Alfred Hitchcock, at trying to ramp up the tension. It was embarrassing -- spiral staircases, gleaming knife, rocky cliffs, ad nauseum -- never once creating a genuinely believable moment. It was as though a modern artist was trying to repaint the Mona Lisa. This was all by-the-numbers.
A few minutes into the movie, we need Teddy was nuts and hallucinating, and yet we had to endure two hours of sordid flashbacks, dead concentration camp kids, a dead wife who keeps reappearing throughout the movie saying the same thing over and over, and the usually overacting of De Caprio, who can't seem to utter a line without making a face of some sort. All I can remember is his dancing eyebrows and histrionics through a fake boston accident.
Leo would have been a bit player in One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, but here he is the big star that somehow the entire island devotes 2 years, entire staff as well, trying to "cure" him of his insanity only to resort to lobotomy in the end. Now that's realistic. Certainly, asylums spent two years on each patient trying to reconstruct their personalities by everyone playing a different role to accommodate the needs of the nutcase. It would have been a lot easier to lock him in a padded cell and be done with it, but then there would have been no movie.
Mr. Hitchcock, if he could, would roll over in his grave at this blatant and failed attempt at honorifics. Time for Marty to take his millions and play video games.