Crap

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2004)

Passionate but overlong and incompetent biographical picture about Jim Morrison, the infamous lead singer of the Doors, played with fire powered gusto by Val Kilmer. Film stumbles and bumbles along the pinpoints of Morrison's young adult life (he died at 27) from meeting his girlfriend played by Meg Ryan, to quitting film school, to forming the Doors with his friend, to playing in concerts and the infamous Ed Sullivan show incident, and of course, Jim's various outbursts of uncontrolled frenzy, Jim's unfaithfulness to his girlfriend, before showing his death in France.

As I said, Val is great as Jim and is also an uncanny look a like and also did his own singing (the real band said they couldn't tell Val's singing apart from Jim's) but the film is just an excessive pile of crap that doesn't really tell you anything about Jim Morrison except that he was a drug addict and a self-destructive psychopathic freak. Still, the real tragedy is that such an obviously gifted and talented man wasted his life so badly. I guess the old saying goes that the light that burns twice is bright burns half as long.