13 Reasons Not To See Any Movie With Kevin Costner

Rating: 5/10 (25 January 2002)

Only Kevin Costner would have hubris enough to insert his mug alongside modern day legends JFK and RFK on a DVD case. Open up the case, and Costner is a one man wrecking crew that completely weakens an otherwise powerful film. I don't know if his Kenny ODonnell character is real or fiction, but he manages to make that point irrelevant. From his Forrest Gump type omnipresence to his truly not to be believed Mayor Quimby/JFK accent, Costner does more damage to the Kennedy brothers legacy than an unexpurgated Marilyn Monroe documentary. Is any reasonable person expected to believe that ODonnell's wisdom was the final word in the drama of the Cuban Missle crisis? No, but Costner in his advanced stage of megalomania overlooks this slight detail, in order to make a film in which HE appears to save the world. Again, its a darn shame. Great subject matter naturally, and it scores big on historic drama. If only he had had the courage and humility to simply produce this movie, and left himself as a minor character, or better still, out of shot altogether, this would probably go down as one of the better movies of its time. But his idiotic totally inappropriate appearances rob this film of any sense of realism, and consequently relevance. The tragedy of the failing Hollywood system is well represented in this film and its defining use of error in motion at all levels.