Review of Mad Dog and Glory (1993) by Melvin W — 05 Dec 2011

Milo: You love her? I own her! .

"A cop who'd rather be an artist. A mobster who'd rather be a comic. And a woman who'd rather be anywhere but between them.".

A lot of great people were at work in Mad Dog and Glory. Robert De Niro, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman make up the all-star cast. John McNaughton, who directed Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer directed it and Martin Scorsese produced it. With all that talent I expected a much more lively and much funnier film. What I got was an enormous disappointment. There wasn't much I liked about it. I was even taken aback by the performances from De Niro and Murray. They aren't bad, but they don't seem as good as we know they are.

A cop saves a mobster's life in a holdup. In order to pay the cop back for saving his life, the mobster gives him a girl that he owns. The girl and the cop fall in love and now they have to decide how to stay together and not have Milo go crazy and kill one or both of them. That plot just isn't all that interesting to me and it is even less interesting on screen then it is on paper. .

Mad Dog and Glory ended up being bland, and that is not something you expect when watching a Bill Murray or De Niro film. When I think about it McNaughton directed Henry... in sort of the same fashion. He made everything as dull as possible. In that movie it made sense though. This is supposed to be a comedy and should have been approached much differently. This pretty much shows why he faded away as a director and never really made anything as good or better than Henry.