Bringing Out The Dead

Year: 1999

Grade: C+

Country: USA

Director: Scorsese

Review

it’s safe to say that martin scorsese is over the hill at this point. i haven’t seen “gangs of new york,” but i haven’t heard much good about it. still, for a director of his caliber, being over the hill isn’t that bad of a place to be. i mean, when kurosawa made “ran” and “dersu uzala” he was over the hill, but those were still amazing films – they just weren’t as good as rashomon, ikiru, sanjuro, etc. but back to this film…i think its major flaw is the screenplay. taxi driver and some of scorsese’s other films were wonderfully written – the dialogue was great, the stories were compelling, the characters were often outside of the mainstream, but interesting and iconic. this one just didn’t have that. nick cage’s character had a certain degree of depth of emotion and thought to him (his characters always do), but it wasn’t, to me at least, the kind of depth that was very interesting. it made a stab at being another taxi driver – again we have a character who is isolated to a certain degree from society, but wants to have some connection with it. in this film he happens to be an ambulance driver which doesn’t stray very far from the taxi driver mold; it allows us, through him, to experience the pregnant hookers on the street, or the crazies who regularly need medical attention. in other words it rehashes some of the basics of taxi driver, but with much less success. stylistically the film is a hybrid of taxi driver, with its noir street look, and natural born killers, with its mtv cutting, speeding up time and hallucinogenic imagery. it is interesting at times, but just doesn’t work. sometimes scorsese picks poorly matched music – something that is odd for him – sometimes it (the visual style) just seems to lack purpose. patricia arquette didn’t do it for me at all. ving rhames was a highlight of the film – he brought some looseness and comic relief to the film. it’s wasn’t a bad film, it just never got me interested the way scorsese usually does.