Reviews

This movie is kind of wearing on the senses. First, it starts off with an oriental pawn-shop cliche'. While most of it remains scary to this day. The sappy, tacky townspeople get old pretty quickly. The conclusion is kind of obvious. But the worst two parts about it are the setting and that the stakes are never that high. The girlfriend is never in danger, and the creatures don't appear to be smart enough to be more than a nuisance. Next, the town looks like the "Back to the Future" set, which I found distracting. The stakes of this small, contained town getting destroyed aren't all that intriguing!

I was pleasantly surprised by this. Anyone who has seen the prior movies will know what formula to expect. As the series is about to wrap up, expect many characters to start to get killed off. This really surprised me on many levels. It isn't just more of the same but keeps things interesting. There were several surprises throughout. It wasn't quite as corny or sappy as prior iterations. My all-time favorite was "The Fate of the Furious." This was about female empowerment, which was the overarching theme of this one. Dom kinda played a supporting role while letting the chicks in his life do the storytelling.

I can't rate this any higher. It's just fan service, with a few minor changes from the first one. A few things like ground strikes are present, which were absent from the first one, which was just all dogfighting. But even the return of the F-14 Tomcat feels more like scratching a nostalgic itch, and not much more. There's not much here and even the special effects were of an unrealistic kind. Some of the plot elements ring in as all too familiar. Tom Cruise is still a rogue, who's on the verge of being booted from the Navy, as being stuck at the rank of 'captain' for too long is cause for dismissal in real life.

This is a canned, corporatist movie. The entire soundtrack is incredibly out of place. The Journey Song should have only been played at the beginning but is inappropriately oversaturated throughout. The relationships in the movie seem to be there only to distract from the real action. And it is also incredibly predictable. It's not completely bad but as a whole, I can't recommend it. Maybe someone with different tastes would see some different parts in it. Every cliche imaginable is in this. One good part is that there isn't the usual 80's training montage. But that is a minor point. I guess someone thought to sex up high school wrestling. Too much of the dialogue is there merely to distract, like when Kuch admits he isn't a real Native-American and he made it up. They throw dialogue like that out there and then just move along. Then there's Daphne Zuniga's character, whom they made appear like a romantic rival to the drifter Linda Fiorentino, only to drop that subplot. So, a film full of potentially interesting subplots and characters, drops them all and heads straight for the conventional. Another thing I noticed was the lack of a clear villain. Even the antagonist, up until the end, could be viewed as a sort of tragic figure. At the beginning they hint at his troubled background but never explore it further. But they pull away from any sort of surprises and go for the conventional. The viewer is left with assumptions as to what happens afterward. I could have enjoyed it more if it was longer.

People criticizing this do not understand true art. They totally misunderstand what it means to be human. As an American, I took this to be a statement on British life and, to a lesser extent, modern European man, as well. This has a series of very poignant vignettes that appeal on a human level to all people, and yet works so well as a Euro story as well! This isn't so much about the main character Nick (BTW I LOVE Julian Sands), but about post modern life of Westerners in general. It does the postmodern "thing" much more effectively than Pulp Fiction ever could have!! This is as close to a Spaghetti Western as you'll get. Among the more memorable scenes are: Nick as a young man, witnessing a girlfriend's dad dying of something like cancer, struggling in agony, ignoring him and taking the Lord's name in vain as he chugs pain medicine. Another scene where he stumbles upon pornography clogging a gas station toilet, preventing him from using it. The scene where two illegitimate twins get separated by a group of nuns. One is Italian and a lesbian; the other is English and single. Another scene where Nick is bothered by the wrong type of attention by a disturbed man on a subway. I believe this is about, at least partially, Nick's awkward walk in life where he struggles for attention and approval from others, and finds none, or else the wrong type of attention. The religious elements are just there to give a McGuffin to the story, to mislead, I think... I believe the artistic statement of this movie us: the folly of man in the face of true religion. How lost man is, how underdeveloped he is in the face of God, and how man's interpretation of religion causes men like Nick to struggle in his pursuit of life in the flesh??... That's my take...

There's no artistically redeeming value in this at all. The only reason I gave it 2 stars is that it contains some, although embellished, history... there is literally a freak show with sexual acts performed... It is beyond offensive, beyond vomit! It starts off in the first 20 minutes as promising, and then devolves into distractions. This is just chaotic from beginning to end. I bet real Rome was just like this. It gives absolutely no context to the actions of the characters at all. The set design is terrible, in opposition to what other reviewers are saying. Malcolm Mcdowell is not even that good at making the audience hate his character.

This movie will either be really offensive, or really good to you. If you're a person who's bothered by the youth culture and college antics, this will definitely not be for you. Less about the storyline, and more about the shock value. As someone else said, you either love it or hate it. For what is supposed to be love story, it is drowned out by mere silly plot elements. I found it extremely offensive, as well as poorly executed. The disturbing plot elements are bad. Everything from suicide in a bathtub to close encounters with a touchy drug dealer are included. Nothing about this has any greater meaning. But such nihilism is done better and more artfully in other, more delicately executed films. This raw pile of garbage was just terribly insensitive!

The story is flooded with lush and vibrant visuals and characters. However, that isn't enough to save a sinking storyline. It is both overly simplistic yet full of red herrings at the same time. The distracting elements and the pacing of the story are all out of sync. Nonessential characters like the real estate agent are never explained in full. Certain aspects of the plot, like the plague, seem just glossed over. Characters portrayed as nonessential are actually the central characters of the storyline, yet they aren't given much screen time, so it wasn't very well done. I seem to have a print which excludes the shot of the destroyed castle at the end. Very disappointed! This feels like a movie short, and requires a second or even third viewing to catch all the plot elements which just speed by. Even though it is feature length. Once you've seen it, no need to watch it again!!