ridiculous rating

Am I Missing Something?

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Good movie/ great acting. I can see where alot of ideas that gave birth to Natural Born Killers came from. I loved Dirty Grandpa, I caught 4 to 5 scenes very close to in the movie.

Cape Fear (1991) - The movie directed by Martin Scorsese and acted by Robert De Niro as this is their next film after Goodfellas (1990). This film is a remake of the same titled film in 1962. The plot journey is quite slower in the first half but things getting interested when then complex started with the character of Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is looking for his revenge. I am very impressed with Robert De Niro performance since Godfather II (1974) & Taxi Driver (1976). In this film, he is fully transformed himself to a psychopath murderer. Overall, I will give 7/10 for this crime, thriller and drama.

If there's one thing that gets the blood of the cinema-goer boiling as their eyes light up with fury and anger, it's the word "remake." Or "reboot." Or "re-imagining." Or whatever other flowery terms that producers throw together to describe a former franchise reborn for new audiences. Just look at the inane controversy surrounding 2016's "Ghostbusters" reboot or the reaction to the recent strain of horror-film retreads to see audiences practically frothing at the mouth in rage over the concept of remakes of earlier classic films, whether or not the new films themselves are decent or not. But every so often, you encounter that rare diamond in the rough... a remake that is widely appreciated and beloved, and is allowed to stand on its own without negative comparison to the original source material. Those rare films that audiences embrace despite their status as remakes of old classics. Martin Scorsese's 1991 retelling of the classic thriller "Cape Fear" is most certainly one of these films. It's an excellent and tense thriller in its own right, and is never weighed down by the expectations brought about by the previous iteration. It's one of those rare remakes that people adore and enjoy, able to look past its labeling as simply a modernized version of an established story.Nick Nolte stars as Sam Bowden, a lawyer who is living with his wife and daughter (Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis), trying to rebuild his life. However, a former client named Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is released from prison, and becomes obsessed with tormenting Bowden and his family, seeking retribution for 14 years of imprisonment that he blames Bowden for, knowing that he suppressed evidence that might have lessened his sentence. Cady is cold and cunning, obsessed with vengeance and having transformed his body and mind through fanatical religious obsession and constant physical training, and seeks first to corrupt and damage everyone and everything around Bowden before targeting him for his final depraved act of vengeance. And so, Bowden and his family, torn apart from past events, must band together and work through their issues to try and stop this madman from destroying them...This very much is a film all about the performances and visual direction, where the actual storyline more-or-less takes a backseat to keen use of character and devilish aesthetics. Nolte and De Niro in particular are absolutely magnificent, and serve as just an incredible duo of adversaries to follow. Nolte's transformation from a man who is essentially a wannabe "perfect guy" into a terrified and damaged figment is just stunning, and De Niro hams it up to perfection with his fire-and-brimstone performance as a deranged, sociopathic lunatic who is just as entertaining as he is deadly. I also highly admired Juliette Lewis' role as Bowden's daughter, who becomes one of Cady's prime targets. She's exceptional, and it's honestly a shame she's not been getting as much high profile work over the past decade. I also really admired supporting roles by the likes of Joe Don Baker and original cast members Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. All play their roles to perfection despite the amount of screen time given, and all help to build up the oppressive and intense world Scorsese sculpts.Scorsese delivers one of his most stylish and devious turns as a master visual storyteller in this film, and he relishes in piling on the tension and suspense with each passing moment. I've always highly admired Scorsese, even if I've only really seen a handful of his films. He's one of the great minds in cinema and he never delivers anything less than stellar in terms of storytelling. Here, he goes full-on into the insanity with a child-like glee, tossing and turning and tilting the camera whenever he can and expertly using a keen mixture of extreme close-up and wide-shots within every given seen to craft slow- building senses of paranoia and claustrophobia. But he never pushes it too far, and it always organically builds off of the scene and the emotional state of the characters he's exploring at a given moment. And he knows precisely when to slow it down or ramp it up, giving us a varied but also harrowing and entertaining experience in terror.Were I to lodge any complaints against the film, it would be that fundamentally, it's a bit overstretched and loses some steam in its second half, with a slower pacing that doesn't always match the manic energy of the performances and Scorsese's visual aesthetic. It feels as though a good 10 to 15 minutes of screen time are spent on meandering long-shots and sequences that could easily have been condensed together. Case in point is a prolonged sequence involving a sting operation lead by Joe Don Baker's Claude Kersek, with could have been pretty seamlessly cut down to a much more startling and impactful scene if its editing was a bit more abbreviated. Still, this is only a minor complaint against an otherwise exceptional thriller.As it stands, "Cape Fear" is definitely amongst the ranks of "The Thing" and "The Fly" as one of the more startling and high-quality remakes to come out of the Hollywood system. It's an intense and often terrifying feature that stands proud alongside the original as a valid and important retelling. And I think it's a film that's very much well worth experiencing for fans of terror and pure, emotional suspense. And so, I give it an excellent 9 out of 10.

Going into this film, I had very high expectations. Starring Robert DeNiro, Jessica Lange, and Nick Nolte, visions of intense sequences and perfected cinematic segments danced in my head. Much to my disappointment, I was instead met with awkward dialogue that was poorly recorded and a climax that was further over the top than a Michael Bay action shot. In summation, this film follows small-town lawyer Sam Bowden (Nolte), stalked by ex-con Max Cady (DeNiro) who served 14 years for rape due to Bowden's dereliction to acquire him a lesser sentence. Not surprisingly, Cady unleashes his wrath, liberating his pent up rage by threatening the Bowden family in addition to preying on Sam's teenage daughter and other significant women in Sam's life. Minus some slightly awkward dialect, I did enjoy the first half of the film. It kept me enthralled and built suspense similar to that of John Boorman's "Deliverance," which isn't necessarily a compliment, considering Boorman's masterpiece was released in 1971, whereas Scorsese's was in '91. Nonetheless, some of my personal favorites are 70's movies, however THOSE movies actually capitalized on the tension they built, while "Cape Fear" only fell short. Many times, the film dragged me into its thickening plot, only to throw away what tension they'd built with unnecessarily graphic violence or ridiculous conflict successions that did not add to the plot or even remotely make sense. Furthermore, the production value of this film seemed to be particularly low, especially for a Scorsese film starring DeNiro, among other big-name stars, even though its budget was 10 million dollars higher than my personal favorite Scorsese: "Goodfellas." To further remove value from the film, the effects were horrid. Colorful swirls and X-Ray camera filters dominated some of the intense scenes from the first half of the movie, taking away moments that could have been apprehensive or even frightening. These effects looked similar to those of Apple's built in "photo booth" app; cheap and easy to create. I do understand that this is a 90's movie, but in my opinion, that only strengthens my point. An experienced, accomplished director such as Scorsese should have been able to pinpoint what he could do effectively, special effects not included. I will give credit to a deep depth of field used in the film to give it more of an indie feel, creating an unsettling, disturbing aura. Unfortunately, this aura was put to waste through violent scenes that surpassed the savagery of other Scorsese films such as Goodfellas, a feat I did not consider to be possible. Something I very much appreciate about most Scorsese films has repeatedly been his ability to highlight the sadistic nature of the world's criminals, however he went overboard in "Cape Fear." There comes a point that even the heaviest of crime-drama fans cannot bear to watch. I hadn't experienced that until I saw this film. Now that I have bashed it enough, I will end on a good note from this movie. DeNiro was brilliant, as always. A perfect embodiment of the southern rapist that his character was, DeNiro depicted an interestingly mixed character that was filled with ruthlessness, maniacal tendencies, and surprising charm. While Jessica Lange played the same, tedious character she perpetually plays, DeNiro again knocked his role out of the park. Final decision: 3/10.