Review of The Outsiders (1983) by Kevin D — 21 Jan 2011

This movie felt random and over the top. A lot of the scenes seemed forced or contrived. I was questioning the effort put into a few of the scenes. At times the acting seemed on par with some of the stuff I've seen in student film projects in high school. It's tough to explain, but a lot of the exclamation type scenes in this movie were horribly performed and staged.

Coppola did a nice job of creating good visuals in the film, but that was it. He did a nice job of placing music in the background and giving us views of wide shots to see multiple situations taking place simultaneously and there were some nice nature shots/fading shots. However, whatever narrative existed in the book this was based on was missing. The movie has random narration at times that is completely out of place.

Some sequences of the movie just seemed unoriginal in terms of how they were presented. The climax of the middle of the film reminded me of Taxi Driver in terms of how criminals were praised and the battle scenes just reminded me of The Warriors. This might be a good book (I've never read it), but I can tell you that the movie seemed to have little effort put into it and it was hard to get involved with it.

The one plus side about the movie is seeing so many A-list actors at young ages. If you're thinking about watching this, just watch Stand by Me or Boyz N the Hood. Those last two films cover the same material in better fashion.