Absolutely Fantastic

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Shattered is the kind of film that is implausible but entertaining if you don't expect cinematic art. It is certainly no more or less plausible than many Hitchcockian conceits. I mean...sure...the idea of the car being driven through the hairpin curve guardrail giving us a protagonist with complete amnesia rebuilding his life of wealth and women is implausible but...c'mon...Jimmy Stewart having Vertigo and winding up in the same situation isn't on a par? The dialogue is way better than most films. I can't speak about the male leads as I am hetero but the women are worth the ride.Bob Hoskins is entertaining but he is more of a side character who facilitates a story about deceitful characters re-emerging after a life changing event. Just who do you trust?

Yes, this will leave your mind in pieces. It's not just unbelievable. It's stupefying.I want to get this plot as straight as I can without giving away too much or using up all the space. Tom Berenger is a wealthy real estate developer. Right away, I have a problem. What is a real estate developer? Evidently he buys up large tracts of land, chops them into smaller parcels, and sells them at a profit. That's what a butcher does. May we call a butcher a "pig developer"? Got derailed there for a moment. I believe whatever foul disease this movie carries is communicable.Okay. So Berenger is a partner in a prospering business. He wakes up in a hospital in San Francisco with anterograde amnesia. He can't remember anything that happened before the accident that sent his car hurtling over a cliff and left him looking "like hamburger" while his wife checked herself out of the hospital after a few hours.These amnesia stories can be kind of interesting, from "Somewhere in the Night" to "The Bourne Identity." And this one begins with some winning scenes. Berenger returns home to his wife, Greta Scacchi, and to his office, where he is greeted by his staff, including his partner, with the remark that he's lost a little weight.In his home, he stumbles across some photos of his wife in the arms of another man -- a burlier guy with a rough-hewn face. He begins to suspect that his wife and her boyfriend deliberately tried to kill him for his money, and he hires private detective cum pet shop manager Bob Hoskins to look into things.This is where I have to skip much of the plot because there is frankly too much of it. But to buy the story as it's presented here, you have to believe two things. One is that Berenger's character was one man before the accident, and an entirely different man -- different in looks, voice, and personality -- after the accident -- AND NOBODY NOTICED IT. Not his friends or his business associates nor anyone else who knew him.The second is that Greta Scacchi could tumble out of the car while it's plunging one or two hundred feet down onto the rocks below -- and check herself out of the hospital after two and a half hours.You don't simply need to suspend disbelief in order to find this sensible. You have to take that belief and mutilate it. You have to wrench off its head and pour foul fluids down its neck cavity.Well, can I add one thing more, admittedly not in the same league as the two above? A car bangs through a cliff wall, shoots out into the air, and does a one-and-a-half gainer through about five hundred feet of living air -- the longest drop I can remember seeing on film -- and when it lands upside down on the beach below, it detonates gloriously as if it were a two-thousand pound bomb.This is such a cliché that the director, Wolfgang Peterson, should hang his head in shame. Since "Das Boot" he's shown himself to be a nice guy and a commercial hack, devoid of any sense of the poetry he showed in his best-known film, but retaining all his taste for excitement.Berenger is okay in this. He's easy to identify with, but his range as an actor is limited. The default setting for his facial muscles is "serious." He's almost always serious. Here, he stretches and reaches "nonplussed" and, in the most dramatic scenes, almost "discombobulated." Greta Scacchi is adorably flat, though not where it counts. Bob Hoskins delivers the best performance -- humorous at time, savvy always, and full of common sense.But nobody, no matter their quantity of talent, can overcome that plot as its rendered here.

When I first saw this movie I was 15 years old and at that point I thought this movie was pretty awesome. Now, some 15 years later, I would have to say, "meh". Nothing is spectacular about this production but if you can make it to the ending you will be rewarded. It still has one of the greatest endings for a mediocre movie. It is definitely worth watching but don't go out of your way to watch it. In short, if you keep your expectations low enough you will be pleasantly surprised and conversely if you expect too much you will be disappointed. Like many movies, "Shattered" requires a fair amount of suspended disbelief to make its viewing worthwhile. If you can get past some of the unrealistic details and focus on the plot twists your time will not havebeen spent in vain.

Wolfgang Petersen (Poseidon & the Neverending Story)'s Neo Noir starring Tom Berenger, Bob Hoskins, and Greta Scacchi about a West Coast developer who has amnesia after a car accident and begins to suspect his wife of treachery.This begins in a pretty mundane way. It runs like any one of thousands of films of the early 1990's, and there doesn't appear to be anything special about it until you get a little bit of the way into it. Roughly one third through, you begin to see the subtle idiosyncrasies of this work, and soon, you are wholly absorbed.This features some great intrigues, a nice well paced plot, and a really twisty ending. Dialog delivery isn't as bad as you might expect, and the story itself steals the show. Camera angles are a bit odd at times, but nothing like some of those 1970's flicks! All in all, though it was done as recently as 1991, it is horribly dated but I was still completely entertained by this film, and while it's not Friday-Saturday night quality, it makes for a great Saturday or Sunday afternoon diversion.It rates a 7.6/10 from...the Fiend :.