I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

As Good As It Gets

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Really good gangster film for a change, although its not got lots of violence and Hollywood glamour - which makes a lot of those types of film a bit unbelievable and formulaic, the film is essentially about three friends, who take different paths in life, but who remain friends. One dabbles with the gangster seen, one settles down to a blue collar job and start a family, one goes to college. A situation develops which draws them all into a violent and tense stand off, which I felt was believable and done well. The ending is a little predictable, but that doesn't really matter. Good film, good characters.

This is obviously one of those gangster movies to tries very hard to be just like "Goodfellas". But instead of focusing mostly on one character it has three of them. Problem is, there is absolutely nothing good, interesting or original ever happening in the movie. It's a real lackluster movie that lacks at basically every department.Bad writing, bad directing, bad acting, bad editing. The movie is suffering from all these things. Really, I would had been OK for this movie to 'borrow' from other genre movies, if it would had been only done in a good and original way. This is obviously just not the case with this movie.The story really isn't going anywhere, or perhaps it feels that way because it is so clichéd. You basically know beforehand what is going to happen in a scene and how things are going to end up eventually. The story is far from an involving one really because we just never really get into any of the characters. The movie tries to present the three main characters as just average guys, who due to circumstances get caught up in bad situations and get tangled in with the underworld. But thing is, they don't come across as average normal guys at all. They each have their own very clichéd and cardboard, forced personalities. Here we have a sweet guy, a bad guy and a in-between guy, basically. It's also odd how the movie throws in some uninteresting plot-lines for them and then decides to completely focus on them. I mean, when I watch a gangster flick I'm just not that interested in seeing a guy trying to make it at school. The movie could at least had been more interesting if it focused on the Scott Caan characters instead of on the Freddie Prinze Jr. one.And watching Freddie Prinze Jr. acting tough really made me laugh. It really isn't working out very convincing in this movie. He just comes across as a guy who got bullied himself at high school but now he is acting as the tough guy in movies. It's laughable really and his acting comes across as horrible because of this. He is really miscast and Alec Baldwin totally feels out of place as well. I just kept waiting for them to finally do something interesting with his character and they could and should had easily made him an important part of the story but he only shows up a couple of times and to be frank, it feels a bit forced all because his character really doesn't add that much at all. To me, this was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the movie, since I am quite fond of Alec Baldwin and was interested in seeing him in this type of role. With only a few minor changes this movie still could had been a decent one, at it's very least, to watch. Besides different casting and changing the focus of the movie they could had made things a bit more raw and edgier. After all, this is a gangster movie but the movie doesn't really feel as one at all because there is nothing interesting, crime-wise, or violence-wise happening really. Why not put in a big criminal kind of plot, like an heist or hit or something. I'm just making this stuff up as I'm writing this, then how come the writers of this movie didn't think about any of these things. They knew they were writing a gangster movie right? Perhaps it was due to budgeting reasons but this movie is totally lacking the right atmosphere. They could had made the movie moodier if they made the movie a bit more dark to watch. Now it really feels like you are watching a cheap television-series episode. Just a couple of things that would had made this movie so much better to watch.A real pointless and redundant genre effort, that is lacking at every department. Yes, there are far worse movies to watch out there but that doesn't mean that this movie is a good one either.5/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

First off let me say the casting for this movie was blatantly and utterly retarded and it killed the movie for me. One of the main bad guys who is supposed to be a tough Italian mobster is a coddled Irish blue-eyed fop named Alec Baldwin- every scene he is in fails miserably in giving the tough guy Italian one-two punchola- he looks like he needs an Irish coffee and a warmed towel.A lot of voice overs in this movie to cover ground that may have been too difficult for the director to imagine onto film. That was a big minus too.Plusses- da usual tuff guys talking crap and knockin heads and getting some respect when they is out on da town wit dere dames.Final conclusion: the equivalent of methadone for the heroin that is goodfellas, below sopranos in accuracy or believability- but watchable and occasionally pretty good, it loses points since the topic has been covered much, much better in a wide number of other films that came before it.THE PLOT: Some guys that grew up in the neighborhood feel some growing pains as their closeness to several wiseguys intrudes on their lives. Gotti is used as a backdrop for street cred. It would have been better if a lot of stuff the voice over was talking about was instead part of the actual film.Goodfellas, The Godfather, Donnie Brasco, and reservoir dogs do a better wiseguy coverage than this flick- but this IS a watchable addition to the list, so foggedaboudit.

For a movie with so much character focus it's surprising that none of the characters come off the screen (except for Alec Baldwin.) Nor do we care about any of them. The decent moments of this movie try to tug at our hearts, but we don't care because its a tired story with little substance.Freddie Prinze Jr. (Michael) is your average troubled Italian kid cum mob boss in the making. Er... wait. No he's not. That's what the movie we wanted would have presented. The movie starts with a long monologue explaining how growing up in Brooklyn has forced Michael to play by a new set of rules (hence the name). The problem is there's 2 moments in the movie were he even grasps at being a tough guy. In reality he's a quiet college boy who's worst faux pas is cheating on a test in school. What a rebel playing by his own set of rules. Oh wait, that was James Dean. Micheal lives in a world surrounded by wise guys yet he spends the length of the film shunning the world he lives in. Struggling to get out of Brooklyn and away from his stupid friends and the wise guys around the corner. How captivating! Not. Freddie is possibly the worst person to make into a Brooklyn hood. He looks like he popped out of a J. Crew catalog, not from Tony Soprano's Escalade. The action is slow. Which isn't surprising from Terence Winter. It was one of the problems with the Sopranos. At least The Sopranos had good dialog and great actors who absolutely played their parts to perfection. The Sopranos also had good story lines. This movie has none of that.Alec Baldwin is good as always (the little we see him), but his character has little point to the story other than to be the "mob" presence in most of the story line. Baldwin's character seems to represent everything in the movie that we didn't get. The only great parts of this movie have Baldwin doing his best to make something out of nothing and we get very little of that.When the pivotal action finally turns up (and we're begging for it) the movie seems it may become what we wanted it to be. Yet it still just doesn't pay off. It's recycled. We get a few scenes with Alec Baldwin doing the things we want a mob movie to do. Then we're forced to watch the main characters sit around and talk about it. The plot line runs without humps or spikes. There's no build or climax. The movie ends on the same level it started.We've seen this all before, and much better in A Bronx Tale, Goodfellas and pretty much every other coming of age mob story. Calling this a mob movie is kind. All mob references are seen from afar. We only catch whispers, see wise guys across a room and a great true-life mob storyline being played out and discarded on the TV. This is as much a mob movie as Python's "Holy Grail" was a movie about religion.The main problem with this movie is it can't decide what to focus on. There's no real plot. The mob aspect of the film tags along in the background and teases us with some good "Bada Bing" fun that never arrives. Is it a mob movie? A coming of age story? A love story? Who knows because it never grabs one story and holds on to make it worth it. There are no defining moments. There are no moments that explore character. We're left with a tangling mess that seems to have been put together from the "Mob Movie" cutting room floor.