quinnmass

What a steaming turd of a movie this is. Here's a policy, if literally every bit of dialogue or plot point is some lame, worn cliché, you know this is the result you get.

Naomi Watts is shot at the end, the bullet is lodged next to her pulmonary artery. "Either way, she's going to die," says Caine from Kung Fu. "Goddammit, you get that bullet out of there!" Well, okay, if you put it like THAT, I guess I CAN save her after all.

Retarded.

Gee, who knew the son would be threatened by some impending disaster (cattle stampede)? Who knew he would freeze up, impotently unable to react due to the fear? Who knew the handsome stranger would valiantly come to the rescue in the nick of time? Who could have seen a scene like this coming? Who knew there would be a scorned love rival later acting as the point man in condemning the woman who scorned him? Wow, that's original. A final confrontation with a duel in the street, the hero outnumbered? The final dialogue between hero and big bad guy filled with tough talk and machismo? "You just don't get it, do you? I always win." Yawn.

Gee, a plot line involving a woman falling in love with a man outside her social group? And that setting up conflict? You don't say. Main characters who are deemed to have no hope of survival magically beating the odds and surviving? Never seen that before.

Hopefully, even one subsequent reviewer who liked this movie will be able to identify a single moment, a single unpredictable plot point or bit of dialogue that wasn't so supremely clichéd that I couldn't have written it in my sleep.

And that deserves criticism. When you make a movie that adds absolutely nothing new, it's the same contrived story with the same contrived dialogue and just different actors, then it deserves utter derision. The Outsider is by no means the only movie to fall into this category - there are plenty - but the derision should be there nonetheless. It becomes simply a cynical money grab, since there is no contribution being made, no remote attempt to add an original twist onto old material. Cynical money grabs deserve a 1 in the ratings.

I cannot remember the last movie I saw that was this cliched. I'm not sure one iota of celluloid was wasted on an original moment.

I'm too exhausted from being beaten down by this movie's lack of creativity that I cannot even list the particulars. Suffice to say, every single relationship in this movie is standard, stock cutout typicality. Every plot point develops exactly on cue. Every swell of music, every poignant pause, every fighting sequence... all cliches.

I will never get these 2+ hours back.

Holy crap.

And I wanted to LIKE this movie.

As a movie, the movie sucked. It sucked in the kind of dismally bad way that only the laziest of movies can. The young male romantic interest of Kirsten Dunst ranks high in the pantheon of Characters that Should Be Killed As Soon As Possible With a Blunt Instrument - he is as likeable as the Dell Guy.

However, the only reason I write is to comment on the poker scene, which takes the cake for spectacular laziness. For a movie involving two characters who are supposed to be the top two greatest poker players in the world, it would be nice if the writer had actually bothered to peruse the rudimentary structure of poker games.

In the scene where James Caan plays the kid at poker, Caan is playing Texas Hold'em. The kid, however, is apparently playing 5-card draw. Caan's TWO cards face down are pocket Queens. That's unfortunate for him, because the kid has FIVE cards in his hand, which contain at least trip deuces. Let's make sure we got that. In the same hand of poker, one guy is playing a completely different form of poker than the other!! HA HA HA HA HA HA. When I saw this, I sat in stunned, giggly disbelief.

This is not a little error. It is unforgiveable sloppiness, especially when you bill your movie as a Vegas, gambling movie that involves the two greatest poker players in the world. It's as if a 5th grader wrote this. If it were a sports movie, it would be like one guy playing his golf shot while his opponent, a football player, tackles him. Retarded. Just like the entire surrounding movie.

Ok, I like Dustin Hoffman. I like Roy Scheider, and Lawrence Olivier was a great actor. Fine. The dentist scene is visceral and creepy and quite memorable. Fine. People I respect have said many positive things about William Goldman. OK.

Having said that, this movie rates HIGH on the Unintentional Comedy Scale. The plot is unthinkably, profoundly inane and laughable and nonsensical. I.N.A.N.E. Let me get this right, and I am quoting other commenters here, `a Columbia graduate student (Hoffman) unwittingly thrust into a game of deadly international intrigue when his brother (Scheider) is killed by a Nazi fugitive (Olivier) looking to smuggle a stash of diamonds he had left over from World War II after escaping justice' (virek213) and `Dustin Hoffman plays a marathon runner whose CIA brother is killed by an evil former nazi played by Laurence Olivier.' (Adam Morrison). You're kidding, right? Take out the words `Olivier' and `Hoffman' and we have the makings of a plot that doesn't even pass the laugh test.

Ask yourself, why is Hoffman's character involved? Because, ala Dr. Evil, Olivier stabs Scheider BUT DOESN'T KILL HIM. He just leaves. I mean, just slit the guy's throat. Come on. Even Scott Evil knows this. Just get a gun and shoot the dude. Oh, wait, I forgot, we have to leave him there, NOT QUITE DEAD, so that we can spend an enormous amount of complicated energy panicking about whether the guy we easily could have killed happened to say anything to anyone before he died. Brilliant. I mean, did any of you people think of this when you wrote your reviews? I am not making this up - there are POSITIVE reviews for this farce here.

Think this one through. I am an evil Nazi dentist. I decide to send a woman, a spy, to America, to seduce the brother of an American spy that I work with, so that I can. oh Jesus, I don't know. maybe if later and we're in a fantastical scenario where I need to kill the brother/find the brother, then she can - surprise - turn on him, since she will be the person he relies on, HE WILL BE COMPLETELY FOILED, and I will have succeeded! As part of this clever strategy, I send my goons (one of whom comically limps - where was the `BWAHAHAHAHA!'?, one of whom is Al Neri, on loan from Michael Corleone) to beat them up! Why? Who knows? Best not to ask!

I keep my diamonds in a bank in New York City. As the William Devane character says, `and now he's [Olivier] going to expose himself to incredible risk!' to come get the diamonds. Smart. Good plan. NYC. Good place to keep all my valuables, so if I ever need 'em, it will be INCREDIBLY RISKY to get 'em. But only risky because my brother, who had the key all along and could have just walked in there and gotten the diamonds at any time, ever, has just died because he could not overcome his evil irresistible impulse and ran into (I am not making this up) a gas truck, which exploded.

As for the scene at the house. I am just at a loss. I don't even know where to start. There are 5 people at the house, and 0 out of 5 of them behave with any logic. If you think from each of their standpoints what they are doing, and really try to puzzle it out, it's just nonsensical. I think the writers just decided, OK, everybody needs to be dead at the end of this scene, except for Hoffman. Then they tried to work backward and figure out how this whole shootout would actually play out, logically. Then they said, screw it, and went to lunch.

It's important, when you want to keep a low profile in an area where you could be recognized, and also you're an evil Nazi with a past, to bark at Jewish people in a screamy sort of ordering tone, so that you keep yourself disguised and don't jog any memories. And how many seconds before the woman who recognizes the Nazi gets run over by the car was it obvious that this clichéd movie convention was about to happen? For me, it was only about 8 seconds.

The closing scene is just laugh out loud funny. I mean, could it have been more awkward? Did that all take place so that our hero is not gunning someone down and is therefore morally able to claim the high ground? Nazi has to die, but hero can't just kill him. Isn't self-defense a little more standard of a movie convention that they could have gone with? He just trips on the steps and falls? Please. How lame is that? As lame as this whole moronic movie.

To entertain myself (it had to come from somewhere) I rooted for (1) the characters to die and (2) anyone involved in adding to the hype of this movie to die, in as painful a way as can be conceptualized.

I want to point out one thing that particularly bothered me about this movie. It is October in Maryland. Thus at this time of year the dark lasts slightly longer than the light. Yet, at some point in the afternoon while it's still light, they sit down to bicker with one another, drained from having walked "16 hours" since that morning's camp. What sloppiness. Moreover, these idiots used no cleverness whatsoever in trying to figure their way out of the forest. I just looked at their deaths as an excellent opportunity to thin the gene pool.

"To da Fadderland!" They are in a blimp. It is above LA. Da Fadderland is in Europe. Blimps are slow. The US Army, the FBI, everybody knows what's aboard the blimp, the most top secret technology imaginable, on which the war's outcome will turn. God, I hated this movie.

Maybe this movie suffers because I saw it such close proximity to genuinely good movies (Traffic, Shawshank and Ordinary People). And I am sure that if I was ten or eleven it would have been good to watch. But the truth is this movie has problems, lots of them.

It is "based on a true story." After seeing the movie, I can believe the following is true: (1) Alexandria, VA exists; (2) the high school there has a football team; (3) in 1971 it won a bunch of games; (4) the coach was newly hired, and black; (5) some people didn't like it, and it took some getting used to; (6) 1971 was a time, in general, in America, where racial integration was a source of bitter contention in many places; (7) Alexandria probably had some unease with the transition. Everything else about this movie has to be manufactured by Disney.

I think the low point for me was when Gary's girlfriend runs on the field to shake Junior's hand before the game. See, previously she was one of the people unwilling to accept blacks into the school. But now she's learned (somewhere off-screen) that she was wrong. (1) She recognizes it; (2) she has enough poise as a high schooler to admit her beliefs were ill-founded; (3) she picks a dramatic/extremely inappropriate moment to acknowledge her change. What poignancy! Gee, we learned a lot about ourselves. There were so many "movie conventions," flat, stereotypical characters and cliches in this movie that I felt cheated. The good characters learn something about themselves and change and grow, the bad characters are called out by the good characters - we don't know much about the bad characters, just that they're bad - and they are put in their place. The good guys win, the bad guys lose. Minds are changed. People grow. A soundtrack plays.

Also, remember Jerry Maguire? That kid was cute, audiences love that. Let's put one of those in our movie. We'll give her lots of lines, and we'll be constantly reminded how unusual she is - most little girls don't know football in depth, but she does!! - and hence, comedy.

Every time I tried to like this movie (and I went in hoping to like it) it spat out packaged non-reality that jarred me into deep irritation. This is not the worst movie of all time, but I felt patronized being asked by its producers to follow along. 2 out of 10.

OK, there's Independence Day, there's Battlefield Earth, there are other films that make you feel as if you've been repeatedly kicked in the face (anything starring Pauly Shore), but this piece of unadulterated garbage takes the ALL-TIME cake. I saw this movie's official "World Premiere" when it debuted at our college theater. Sometimes movies are so terrible that you can enjoy them in a perverse way, but sometimes they shoot right on past that zone and back into catastrophic abysmality where you just feel like someone is pounding on your skull with a ball-peen hammer. There is not one original thing in this film. The acting is horrific. The dialogue is horrific. The plot is asinine beyond any comprehensible point. When the head spontaneously comes to life and assembles random junk together to become the scary monster, there's one low. Another is, after just shredding the pervert dude with its overwhelming physical power, our plucky heroine is wrestling, that's right, WRESTLING with this thing and manages to get away. It's an Alien-Terminator combo plot that smacks of the lamest attempt at character development and originality ever committed to paper. I never have seen, nor will I ever see, any movie this cataclysmically horrendous as long as I live. It's badness staggers the imagination. On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a -7,498.