Dreadful crock

Rating: 2/10 (1 May 2012)

This movie earned rave reviews for one reason only, salacious interest in a twelve year old prostitute. A gratuitous detail, why did she have to be twelve?
Travis Bickel played by de Niro elicits no sympathy or credibility at any point.
Witness his lame dialogue at chatting up the Cybil Shepard character on the phone. Witness de Niro giving her an LP and admitting that he "knows nothing" about music. Witness him telling the politician Palladino that he supports him and hopes that he wins the election, and then telling Palladino that he "knows nothing" about politics. There was another instance where the lead character confesses that he "knows nothing" about some or other issue that had been explored and then summarily cut off by "knowing nothing".
Witness the lead character performing the standard and predictable American procedure when a woman states her disinterest in him. The man must grab her by the arm and pull and shove her about. I do not find this (admittedly mild) form of assault to be romantically feasible yet it is standard fare in American movies. Are American women different? Do they change their minds after a little display of childish violence?
We also have the great Scorsese attention deficit, lazy sloppy and stupid showing the protagonist cutting off one of the sleeves of his shirt (why?) and in the next shot the sleeve is back. This isn't a goof, it is unforgivably lazy. At this point you realise that this "masterpiece" is a piece of junk.
At some point we arrive at the point of the movie, the unnecessarily young prostitute. More lazy sloppy work follows. Predictable painfully shallow dialogue. "why are you doing this?" etc.
Now the pace of the film speeds up because our stupid lazy director is running out of film stock.
Now that the director has fulfilled his child sex fantasies he can give us a gratuitous violence and loving pornographic focus on obviously fake blood and gore and the film quickly wraps with an easy implausible ending.
Our twelve year old whore has gone back to school??? with parents who can't afford to visit New York and she is apparently happy in the rust belt town of Pittsburgh. Poor and happy in Pittsburgh don't make sense.
Her close associates have been violently murdered in front of her and she trots off to school with a bunch of strangers in some godforsaken city?
Our hero has casually killed three people using unlicenced firearms, yet he suffers absolutely zero consequences (another American specialty?) save for hero status in the media and (predictable) interest from the Cybil Shepard person.
A shallow stupid and unoriginal story. Perfect for short American attention spans, lazy untidy directing and unconvincing portrayals except for the whore and the pimp.
Alienation is not interesting