I'd take the bullet too.

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2002)

Never have I seen such an overrated film as "The Deer Hunter." Many people wonder why Cimino never made another great film . . . I have to say the such people are flawed in their thinking: Cimino never made a great film.
The wonderful, big-name cast make the most of a clumsy, frustrating and awkward screenplay, but it is Cimino's heavy-handed direction which ruins what little there is of salvage value here. Cimino never met a scene he could shorten. The first forty-five minutes of this flim ought to be less than half that length. Arguments can be made that Cimino took great care in letting us into these characters' lives, but I argue that I would've liked them more if I knew less about them. Not one character left me identifying with or caring about them.
I'm sure the film played better to late-seventies audiences eager to embrace post-Vietnam hand-wringing and guilt, but now it just doesn't wash. Better films about Vietnam were made around the time of this film which still hold up today. Additionally, a disturbing stench of old Hollywood lingers in this film, something akin to Casablanca in Southeast Asia. This is not a good thing.
On the plus side, the cinematography of the steel mill town and surrounding mountains is effective (the town itself is so well shot that it seems to take on a personality of its own), but the Thailand-as-'Nam sequences are unconvincing.
Bottom line: Cimino blows. ** out of five.