Review of Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) by Daniel M — 15 Oct 2009

For a film with Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey and Ed Harris altogether, this was hugely disappointing. If you dislike David Mamet's frequent profanity, you'll not enjoy this anyway, but even if you overlook that or put it down to the mood being created, this is still a poor script. The lines are tiresomely repetitive and dull (e.g. all the mention of 'leads' is unnecessary. We get the message). So you get the sense that Mamet's storyline is very thin and he's forced to use repetition and profanity to pad this out to 100 minutes.

As far as the performances go, Al Pacino is great as the ruthless Ricky Roma, and Jack Lemmon is generally convincing as the desperate Shelley Levene. Other than these, however, the characters are very thin and two-dimensional. Pacino's scenes with Jonathan Pryce feature some great lines of monologue but he never lets Pryce speak, so we are never completely convinced of how pathetic he is. Kevin Spacey's character only really becomes three-dimensional in the last 20 minutes or so; until then he is a stereotypical pencilpusher. And Ed Harris and his colleague are not given enough to do. The long sequences where they are 'talking' about breaking into the office could have worked as a red herring if it had been so strung out.

In all, a big disappointment.