As Good As It Gets

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

When I was a kid (I'm talking elementary school here folks) I used to play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons with my older brother. It was pretty fun but it was the kind of thing one could sort of grow out of over time. When I was in college I realized one of my roommates was big into D & D and somehow we got to talking about how demonized it was in the eighties and early nineties because soccer moms somehow thought it was evil and sacrilegious. This led to him telling me about "Chick Tracts" (those comics written and illustrated by religious nutjob Jack Chick that depict Dungeons and Dragons as being a satanic cult game) which led to him telling me about Mazes and Monsters. He said it was one of the worst things he had ever seen and he talked about how he genuinely hated it and he warned me against ever seeing it but the more I found out about the movie the more hilariously bad it sounded and I got to a point where I just HAD to track it down. Thanks to Netflix I was able to track this glorious film down and I have to say as a drama it fails spectacularly but as a comedy film it's an all-time classic. The over-the-top acting (even from Hanks), the overly geeky and stereotypical characters and the really awful effects and rubber monsters just make this movie a truly spectacular gem of a film. Seriously. If you love the "so bad they're awesome" kinds of movies you'd see on Mystery Science Theater and you want to get a good laugh out of how stupid conservative parents in the eighties went after D & D of all things, this movie is for you. It excels in so many ways as comedy gold.

If you didn't know better, you would believe the Christian moral majority in their preachy testimonial of the sins of the young, their questing for Satan, and that Hell was just brimming with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons fans.None of these items bears one grain of truth, folks. This work does nothing but give the Southern Baptists a chance to take a breath, while the movie continues to spout their erroneous and alarmist views concerning a creative and original gaming system.Tom Hanks contributes a stellar performance for this work, but even that wasn't enough to save it. It's crap. It's beneath crap. It is ignorance breeding ignorance and as such, it rates NOTHING from...the Fiend :.

Many things become clear when watching this film: 1) the acting is terrible. Tom Hanks and Wendy Crewson are so-so, but the parent-child conflict borders soap opera-ish. The other two boys: an overly pouty child prodigy and your stereotypical I'm-a-babe-but-I'm-really-sensitive-inside blonde dreamboat; 2) the film as a whole is depressing and disappointing; 3) Robbie's dreams and episodes are disturbing (acted by Tom Hanks); 4) the inclusion of the beginning love ballads is an odd choice ("we are all special friends"); 5) the weird lines and side plots are not made any better by the terrible acting; and 5) this is a really bad movie. Expect to be disappointed--and probably disturbed.

The psychology of this movie is really weird to try and figure out. Its often billed as an anti-RPG movie, but its really not that simple. Here are come apparent contradictions that make me wonder just what (if anything) they're trying to say about gaming.They laboriously introduce all the characters home lives by way of introduction, all of them having parents who are divorced, alcoholic, and totally out of touch with their lives except for the times they're harshly pressuring them to succeed. Tom Hanks is arguably the worst off, having just failed out of another school and still dealing with a brother who disappeared and may be dead. Its mentioned a couple of times that they play the game to work through problems in their real lives. And sure enough, at the end, when they go to see Robbie (Hanks), they're all happy and well-adjusted, embarking on their adult careers, problems solved, games put away (Daniel doesn't even want to design computer games any more), and even Robbie's mother, who's been constantly drunk and dissatisfied, is suddenly the Happy Homemaker, looking fresh and bright and arranging flowers. Sure, JJ suddenly (and quite cheerfully it seems) decides to commit suicide, but the reason seems to be entirely because he's a lonely boy genius who can't get a date, and not because his character dies, as in the famous Jack Chick tract (which happens afterward anyways, and it almost seems like he does it on purpose so he can end Daniels game and get everyone to come play his. In fact, the prospect of live-action role playing in the caverns seems to be the only thing that saves him from killing himself!) And in what may be the coolest tableau scene in the whole movie, Kate, looking very fetching in chain mail, looks right at the camera and says something like, "The scariest monsters are the ones in our own minds." The biggest fantasy element in this movie is the two muggers passing up the rich couple so they can rob the dirty, homeless-looking guy of his magic beans. The recurring theme (a "The Way We Were" for the 80s)might have been poignant at the end, but as a way to kick off a movie is downright depressing and seems out of place. And for one final mystery, our hero, wearing full Pardu regalia, has a psychotic break, becomes his character completely and embarks on his quest, so of course the first thing he does is change into 20-century street clothes. So maybe the movie's irrational, but I guess its dealing with an irrational topic. In those days a circle of kids with dice and pencils was regarded as tainted and possibly possessed, and you could go insane if they spoke their mumbo-jumbo at you. The anti-game paranoia is pretty much summed up in the first scene, where the reporter asks the cop whats going on, the cop says a kids lost in the tunnels and there's a chance Mazes and Monsters is somehow involved. The reporter admits to being vaguely familiar with the game (although he allows his own children to play it), then turns to the camera and reels off a polished spiel that blames the game for everything and admits no possibility of another explanation. In the end, its no masterpiece, but interesting as made-for-TV movies go.