Review of Phoenix (1998) by Roofus H — 29 Sep 2012

I almost didn't even watch this movie because of all the negative reviews on it. I'm glad I did.

I suppose I'm the minority hear but I did enjoy this movie. Ray Liotta played his role well and so did most in the film. My belief is many people underate this because they have missed much of the subtleties. When it doesn't seem like it, charactors are being developed. I agree with many that there could be much improvement to the film, but I still thought it was great.

The movie was a great framework, a little needed to be added to spice things up. With maybe 20-30 more minutes of film added they could have developed deeper charactors and a thickened plot. If they spend a little less time on basically unimportant dialog, they could have humanized the charactors more.

The film, in my opinion, was good but would easily be great (maybe even a classic?) with the following:

-Deeper plot development.

-More development of charactors(background, habits, personality, humanizing, emotion).

-More time spent on antagonist like Louie, Lt. Clyde Webber and especially Chicago.

-Development of the relationship between Harry and Leila, or just leave the parallel love story out to make time for other scenes.

-Less ambiguous ending, Particularly charactor motivations. for example:

- Why did Nutter and Henshaw decide to have a shoot-out with the cops instead of trying to pin it on Harry Collins? They didnt seem to be backed in a corner.

- Why did Henshaw kill Nutter as he was surrendering to the cops, ensuring his own death?

-Why did Harry keep only SOME of the money to send to Leila and burn much of it rather than keep all or most of it?

-Why didnt Harry take the money after Chicago and his boys were dead?

-Why didnt Harry Collins say goodbye to Leila or try to run away with her, with the money for a better life?

This seems like it may be a lot to change or a lot to improve a film but when you think about all that went into the film it really is not that much to change or add. It would have been a good bit of time as far as filming these changes would go but thats it. This movie was great in everything it did, but only good because they left much of the juicy goodness out. As a resuult of this I am giving it an 80%, I would prefer to go with 75% but RT does not allow for this which they should.