SLEEPERS ** (out of four) -by Bill Chambers
(For more purple prose check out FILM FREAK CENTRAL http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/7504 I now include a section where YOU the surfer can recommend movies to ME and other netheads. Have a freakin' good time.)
Kevin Bacon, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt written & directed by Barry Levinson
With a weak script at its core, SLEEPERS is akin to the world's greatest chefs making toast. Based on the supposedly non-fictional book by Lorenzo Carcaterras (it's difficult to believe, for starters, that Carcaterras and his friends look like Patric and Pitt), the film offers very little in the way of tension or drama, and even resorts to such tired devices as (flat, obvious) narration to make sense of the complicated--but by no means involving-- plot. This is despite a wealth of talent before and behind the camera.
Hell's Kitchen is the setting for the story, in which a group of four mischief-prone boys accidentally injure a bystander when one of their pranks goes awry. Said boys are then sent to a reformatory, where they pay for their mistake in the form of Bacon's perverted guard, who sexually tortures them repeatedly during their stay. Fourteen years later, two of his victims discover Bacon at a bar and gun him down. It's up to Patric and Pitt, who have grown up to become a reporter and a lawyer, respectively, to help their childhood amigos win the court case that follows.
The best thing one can say about SLEEPERS is that it features some nice performances by DeNiro as Father Bob, the neighbourhood priest, and Dustin Hoffman as a washed-up alcoholic lawyer, as well as a few well-crafted individual scenes. Levinson (RAIN MAN, DISCLOSURE) pays no attention to detail in terms of the eighties sequences, in which everyone wears stylish 1996 clothing. But that's a moot point compared to the script's central problem: we don't care about any of these people, or whether they triumph in the end, because their personalities are interchangeable and ultimately unappealing. The pacing is terrible; if Levinson insisted on making a film this long (two-and-a-half hours) he should have spent the time developing the characters instead of showing us redundant flashbacks and silly scenes which further complicate the plot.
Molestation and pedophilia are very serious issues that have been fashioned here into a story as perfunctory and pointless as a TV movie-of-the-week. While "Sleepers" in the film are defined as people who have been waiting to get revenge, the title more aptly describes director and crew during the making of the film. It's bad enough that these wonderful chefs made toast. They burned it.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews