This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Drama, F, Romance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Starring: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Thomas Gibson, Robert Prosky, Colm Meaney
Director: Ron Howard
When it tries to be funny, it ain’t. When it tries to be an interesting historical epic, it ain’t. When it tries to be too long and feel like it goes on for a week? Well, one out of three means a failure. Tom Cruise has made lots of good movies. Ron Howard has made lots of good movies. For both of them, this is a bloody disgrace. It seems like Cruise wanted to make a movie with Nicole and couldn’t be bothered to wait for a decent project. Maybe Ron owed him a favor or something. The script is a mess and Howard even shares writing blame with Bob Dolman. Be warned, it is my plan to tell the whole story to save you the pain of watching all of it to see how it ends (exactly like you think it will).
Cruise is Joseph Donnelly, a hard-working, ambitious young Irish lad (with a patchy accent, but what the hell) who plans to take revenge on his cruel landlord. The revenge thing doesn’t work out, and he somehow ends up going to America with the landlord’s daughter, Shannon Christie, played by Kidman. This is the opening act of this movie and it is wayyyyy too long, and nowhere near as funny or as interesting as they intended it to be.
In America, Donnelly, who is right handy with his fists, ends up being an underground prizefighter, while living in the same boarding house as Christie. Both deny the obvious romantic attraction and have decent lives, until everything is suddenly ripped from them and they soon they are penniless on the street, pursued by Christie’s family. I fell asleep then, but couldn’t bring myself to go back and watch what I missed. There is only so much I’ll do for you people. Sorry. When I jerked awake and wiped the drool off my chin, we were finally in the third act with Donnelly, Christie (now with a romantic rival) and Christie’s family all getting ready to grab land in the Oklahoma land rush. I did kinda like this scene, but I’m not sure why so many horses were falling and why so many wagons were falling apart, so this scene soon got stupid, too. It ends with Cruise and Kidman together with their own land and in love, of course.
The acting was weak, the story was worse. The pacing was awful and the editor should have been dragged behind one of those crashing wagons. The idea of comedy mixed with a historical epic is risky and the jokes weren’t funny anyway. If you want to see Cruise with his shirt off, there is a lot of that. If it has something else to offer, I guess it happened when I dozed off.
