Review of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) by Jack G — 22 Feb 2010

No, it's not as bad as the expectations made me believe. After reading the book though, there are quite a lot of problems.... LARGE problems. But biggest of all is Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, and how he's translated to the screen. Making Sherman McCoy sympathetic is stupid, but I can try and live with it, and Hanks is actually pretty decent in the role (he even has an uproarious scene where he fires a shotgun repeatedly to get a bunch of rich pricks out of his apartment, I found this funny more because of the sight of Tom Hanks going bonkers, not so much the character). And having Morgan Freeman play the judge isn't too bad, except that he wasn't black or Morgan Freeman in the book, nor did he yell like the Principal in Lean on Me or deliver one of those rousing closing speeches we get in movies that is god AWFUL (and, no, not in the book either). But Peter Fallow is the biggest fuck-up of all. His entire conception and execution as a character here is incorrect (and my wife watching the film, not having read the book, found him dull and uninteresting, which shows how he works here). Maybe if the script had been better written for Willis... no, forget it, can't go there. He's by far the thing that is most indefensible.

But is it a total failure. No. It's just confused. It's like a high school slacker who writes about a Mark Twain book and doesn't know whether to focus on Twain the satirist or Twain the inspirational do-gooder. Should've stuck with the latter, especially when looking at De Palma's credits and he's done GREAT satire (Hi, Mom! being the best).