Review of Wild at Heart (1990) by Tom C — 02 Dec 2009

Awful movie. There's a couple really great parts here and there but there's not much of a plot and there's a ton of extraneous characters and there's no real sense of urgency in the journey that the two main characters take.

The Good:

-The opening scene is alarming and abrasive and has you expecting the film to be a wild and violent ride. Great exciting, unexpected beginning.

-Harry Dean Stanton and Willem Dafoe manage to turn in okay performances in a pretty abysmal film that gives both actors little to do with their talents.

-There are several amusing characters but most of the film's most interesting characters appear in only one or two scenes being given only a line or two.

-Willem Dafoe gets the best death scene ever: he accidentally blows off his own head with a shotgun.

The Bad:

-Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern's performances are so over the top that their characters become annoying and you wish them dead early on in the film.

-The length of the film was unnecessarily padded by countless meaningless sex scenes, detours featuring extraneous characters and plotlines that go absolutely nowhere.

-There's far too many scenes to list that are just David Lynch being weird for the sake of being weird.

Overall, so bad it doesn't even fall into that category of movies so bad you have to see them. Willem Dafoe's great death scene can be found on youtube and you'll have seen all of the film you need to see.

2/10.