Director Oliver Stone trades in his historical political rants for the sun-baked beaches of Southern California in Savages, a crime thriller revolving around a lucrative illicit enterprise. The story follows two Laguna Beach entrepreneurs who have cornered the market on high-grade homegrown marijuana. When an aggressive Mexican drug cartel demands a piece of their operation, the duo resists, triggering an escalating gang war that threatens everyone caught in the middle.

Boasting an ensemble cast that features Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, Benicio del Toro, and John Travolta, the production attempts to combine high-stakes action with modern relationship melodrama. Viewers can expect Stone’s signature visual chaos, plenty of gunfire, and a cynical look at cross-border corruption as it arrives on home streaming platforms.

Review by Ben Dover

I sat down on my recliner, fired up my streaming app, and within five minutes of watching Savages, I already wanted to throw my remote control right through the television screen. Here we have a couple of smug twenty-somethings who think they have conquered the universe because they grow fancy weed in a Laguna Beach mansion. One is a tree-hugging pacifist who probably cries when a houseplant wilts, and the other is a brooding ex-Navy SEAL who looks like he eats gravel for breakfast. If that were not irritating enough, they share the same girlfriend. Back in my day, we called that a recipe for a fistfight in the front yard, but today’s coddled youth probably call it modern enlightenment. Give me a break.

The whole setup falls apart the minute real criminals show up. Salma Hayek plays the head of a Mexican cartel, and she wants to partner up with these two beach bums. Naturally, the boys say no thanks because they want to take their millions and hide out in Indonesia or whatever trendy travel spot kids brag about on the internet. So what does the cartel do? They kidnap their shared girlfriend, played by Blake Lively, whose endless whiny voiceover makes you wonder why anybody would fire a single bullet to rescue her, let alone start a miniature world war.

Now, credit where it is due. Whenever Benicio del Toro and John Travolta walk onto the screen, the movie suddenly remembers how to be entertaining. Del Toro plays an oily, thoroughly disgusting cartel enforcer who looks like he has not showered since 1997, and he steals every scene he is in. Travolta plays a sleazy DEA agent with a sick wife who plays both sides just to stay afloat. When these two veteran scoundrels are lying to each other and stabbing people in the back, the movie actually has some genuine bite. You can tell they understand what kind of sleazy pulp story this is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, Oliver Stone cannot get out of his own way. He directs this thing like an hyperactive teenager who drank four energy drinks and discovered the editing software on a laptop. We get random bursts of grainy black-and-white footage, garish digital color filters, and choppy slow-motion cuts that made my head hurt. Stone wants this to be a serious, gritty critique of the War on Drugs, but he shoots it like a two-hour music video for spoiled brats.

And then comes the ending. Oh boy, the ending. Without spoiling the specifics just yet, Stone pulls a trick so cheap and cowardly that it practically insults anybody who invested two hours of their evening. He gives you one dramatic, bloody resolution, laughs in your face, and says just kidding, here is what really happened. It is lazy, it is frustrating, and it completely ruined whatever goodwill the movie had built up. It is not completely unwatchable thanks to the villains, but it is definitely a movie made by people who think they are much cooler than they actually are.

Who Stars in the Movie

• Taylor Kitsch as Chon: The ex-Navy SEAL with severe anger issues and a military haircut. Kitsch scowls his way through the entire runtime, mostly shooting big automatic weapons and reminding everyone that he has zero emotions left inside.
• Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ben: The peace-loving Berkeley graduate who talks about positive energy, botany, and giving money away to poor villagers, right up until he has to light bad guys on fire.
• Blake Lively as Ophelia (“O”): The spoiled narrator caught in the middle. Lively spends half the movie shopping at high-end boutiques and the other half locked in a cartel dog cage while whining about how hard her life is.
• Salma Hayek as Elena Sanchez: The ruthless cartel queenpin rocking a Cleopatra wig. She spends her days running a multi-million-dollar cartel while micro-managing her rebellious teenage daughter over Skype.
• Benicio del Toro as Lado: Elena’s psychopathic enforcer. Del Toro puts on a masterclass in being pure grease and malice, easily making him the best part of the entire picture.
• John Travolta as Dennis Cain: A corrupt, sweating DEA agent who takes bribes, trades government secrets, and tries not to get murdered by either side.
• Demián Bichir as Alex: Elena’s smooth-talking cartel lawyer who acts tough right up until the torture tools come out.

Thoughts on Special Effects

The movie relies heavily on practical explosions, gunfire, and gore rather than massive computer generated sets. When the shootouts happen, they look painful and messy, which fits the crime genre just fine. You get decapitated heads in coolers, bodies burned to a crisp, and a lot of squibs going off during bullet hits. The digital fire and muzzle flashes look a bit rubbery in a few scenes, but the biggest visual problem is not the effects team. The problem is Oliver Stone switching camera formats, grain sizes, and color palettes every five seconds like an indecisive decorator.

Music

The score by Adam Peters provides a decent, moody, bass-heavy background that builds decent tension during the kidnappings and roadside ambushes. The soundtrack is packed with tracks from Bob Dylan, Massive Attack, and Cut Copy, clearly chosen to please both old-school rock fans and modern electronic listeners. It sets the sun-drenched, drug-addled California vibe well enough, even if none of the tunes stay in your head five minutes after the credits roll.

Rating

3 out of 5 Stars (Saved from the bargain bin solely by Benicio del Toro and John Travolta doing their best to act like authentic slimeballs).

If you love gorgeous California scenery interrupted by brutal decapitations and ridiculous plot twists, this is the movie for you.

Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

The story takes place in Laguna Beach, California, where best friends Chon and Ben run a massively successful marijuana ring. Chon is an ex-Navy SEAL who brought top-grade seeds back from Afghanistan, while Ben is a peaceful UC Berkeley botanist who handles the cultivation and charitable distribution. Both men live together and openly share a romantic relationship with a carefree blonde named Ophelia, who goes by the nickname “O”.

Their idyllic, wealthy lifestyle gets ruined when the Mexican Baja Cartel, headed by Elena Sanchez, contacts them with an offer to join forces. Elena’s cartel is struggling with domestic enforcement and wants access to their elite hybrid product. Ben and Chon refuse the partnership and make arrangements to take their fortune and vanish off the map. Before they can execute their exit strategy, Elena’s brutal enforcer, Lado, abducts O from an outdoor shopping center.

Elena sends the boys a video recording of a captured O, demanding that they accept the cartel’s terms and hand over their business operations in exchange for her safety. Desperate, Ben and Chon meet with Dennis Cain, a dirty DEA agent who takes payoffs from their weed profits. Dennis advises them that the cartel is far too powerful to fight and urges them to just give Elena whatever she wants.

Chon refuses to back down. He rallies a crew of his former military buddies, equips them with high-grade tactical weapons, and decides to wage an asymmetric war against the cartel. Through Dennis, Ben and Chon discover that a rival cartel operation, led by a kingpin named El Azul, is already threatening Elena’s organization. They also learn the route of a major Baja Cartel money transfer.

Disguised in tactical gear, Ben, Chon, and their military crew stage a daylight ambush on a cartel transport in the California desert, wiping out the armed escort and stealing three million dollars. During the shootout, Ben is forced to kill a man for the first time, shattering his pacifist lifestyle. Meanwhile, O is held hostage in a dirty safe house by Lado, who torments her while Elena treats her like a captive surrogate daughter.

To cover their tracks, Ben and Chon plant stolen funds and false evidence to make it appear that Elena’s trusted lieutenant, Alex, orchestrated the heist. Lado uses this pretext to torture and kill Alex, burning him alive in front of a horrified Elena. Lado, however, is secretly plotting his own betrayal, as he has secretly allied with El Azul to take down Elena from the inside.

Ben and Chon raise the stakes by locating Elena’s estranged daughter, Magda, who is attending school in Orange County. They kidnap Magda and use her as leverage to force a direct meeting with Elena in the remote desert.

The story then presents its first climax. At the desert meeting, an exchange of hostages turns into a massive, bloody shootout. Lado shoots Chon, Chon shoots Lado, Elena gets killed, and Ben is mortally wounded. Realizing there is no escape, Chon injects Ben, O, and himself with a fatal overdose of narcotics so they can die together in an embrace.

Suddenly, O’s voice interrupts the scene to announce that this tragic ending was only a bad dream. In the actual reality, Dennis arrives at the desert meeting backed by federal tactical units before any shooting starts. Elena is arrested, Lado slips away with the stolen cash after double-crossing his boss, and Dennis manipulates the evidence to give Ben and Chon credit as federal informants. Having secured their freedom, Ben, Chon, and O leave the United States entirely and move to an off-the-grid wooden shack by the ocean to live in tropical obscurity.

5 Famous Quotes from the Movie

1. Ophelia: “Just because I’m telling you this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it.”
2. Chon: “You’re already dead. You’re dead from the moment you’re born. If you can accept that, you can accept anything.”
3. Elena: “There is something wrong with your love story, baby.”
4. Dennis:“You stabbed a federal agent!”
5. Elena:“You thought I wasn’t gonna notice three million dollars and seven of my men dead?!”

5 Notes and Interesting Facts

1. The movie is based on the popular 2010 crime novel of the same name written by author Don Winslow, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Oliver Stone and Shane Salerno.
2. Jennifer Lawrence was originally cast to play the role of Ophelia, but she had to drop out of the project due to scheduling conflicts when she signed on to star in The Hunger Games.
3. Salma Hayek helped design the look of her cartel boss character, including insisting on wearing a striking black fringe wig based on her own creative vision of what a Mexican cartel matriarch would look like.
4. The film features two distinct endings, a structural choice that came directly from Winslow’s book, where the dream sequence served as a dark contrast to the final resolution.
5. Taylor Kitsch underwent intense weapons and combat training with real Navy SEALs to prepare for his action sequences, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson consulted with expert botanists to understand commercial hydroponic marijuana cultivation.

Photos

Trailer

Note: Benicio is slime personified, John Travolta is sweating through his shirt, and I need an aspirin

Get ready for the most ridiculous movie concept of the 1990s. Imagine a world where the FBI has the technology to surgically remove a man’s face and slap it onto another man’s skull like a wet paper towel. That is exactly what happens in Face/Off. John Travolta plays an FBI agent who hates a terrorist played by Nicolas Cage. In a plot that makes absolutely zero sense, they end up swapping faces, lives, and bad acting habits.

Directed by John Woo, this movie is an explosive carnival of nonsense. If you like your action movies loud, completely illogical, and filled with slow motion birds, this preview is your warning. Grab your popcorn and check your brain at the door because science, physics, and basic human anatomy have left the building.

Review by Ben Dover

Let me start by saying that kids today would probably watch Face/Off and complain that it is not realistic enough. Well no kidding. You have John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swapping faces. Cage is a skinny maniac and Travolta looks like he ate a few too many cheeseburgers. Yet somehow, once they swap faces, their entire body types miraculously match up. Nobody seems to notice that the FBI agent suddenly grew an inch and lost thirty pounds. I guess in 1997 we were just supposed to ignore that. And I did, mostly because the movie is so stupid that it circles all the way back around to being entertaining.

The acting in this movie is completely unhinged. You have Nicolas Cage acting like John Travolta acting like Nicolas Cage. Cage spends the first twenty minutes bugging his eyes out and acting like a mental patient who drank twelve cups of coffee. Then Travolta has to take over that role and he prances around trying to be a sleazeball. It is hilarious. They look ridiculous. If anyone in the real world acted like this they would be locked in a padded room before lunch.

Then there is the science. Oh boy. A laser cuts off a face in one perfect piece like a cheap Halloween mask. They drop it in some magic blue goop and slap it on the other guy. No scars. No swelling. Even the hair magically changes length and texture. And do not even get me started on the voices. They put a tiny microchip in their throats so they sound exactly like each other. I cannot even get my cell phone to connect to my car half the time, but these guys have magic throat chips in 1997. Give me a break.

The director is John Woo, a guy who apparently thinks every indoor shootout needs a flock of pigeons flying around. Why are there birds inside a church? Who is feeding them? It makes no sense. He also loves slow motion. If a guy drops a gun, it takes three minutes to hit the floor. But I have to admit, the action is exactly what you want when you are tired and just want to see things blow up. Bullets fly, boats crash, and everyone shoots a gun with two hands while jumping sideways through the air.

Overall, Face/Off is a magnificent trainwreck. You sit there feeling your brain cells dying, but you cannot look away. It is dumb, loud action from a time when movies did not try to lecture you about saving the planet or whatever nonsense people whine about on the internet today. They just wanted to show a guy getting shot in the chest with a speargun. I respect that. Plus they actually said the line “Looks like Elvis has left the building” in a direct reference to Leaving Las Vegas. You have to respect Woo for going 110% for everything.

The Cast

John Travolta as Sean Archer and Castor Troy. He spends half the movie acting like a grieving father and the other half rubbing his own face and acting like a total weirdo.

Nicolas Cage as Castor Troy and Sean Archer. He eats peaches, screams a lot, and acts like he forgot to take his medication. Classic Cage.

Joan Allen as Eve Archer. She plays the confused wife who somehow does not realize her husband is suddenly acting like a psychotic teenager.

Gina Gershon as Sasha Hassler. She is the tough mobster girlfriend. She does a decent job looking mean while everything blows up around her.

Dominique Swain as Jamie Archer. She plays the annoying teenage daughter who hates her parents. Just another reminder of why I cannot stand kids these days.

Special Effects

The practical explosions are great. Real fire and real cars crashing. None of that fake computer garbage they use in every movie now. However, the actual face surgery scene looks absolutely hilarious. It looks like they peeled a rubber mask off a dummy from a cheap magic shop. Also, every time a bullet hits a wall or a floor in this movie, a giant shower of sparks flies out. I am pretty sure drywall does not spark when you shoot it, but what do I know?

Music

They use loud, dramatic orchestra music every single time someone looks at a mirror. We get it, they have the wrong face. You do not need to blast the horns. There is also a scene where a massive, bloody shootout happens while “Over the Rainbow” plays in the background. I guess they thought they were being clever and artistic. It was mostly just weird.

Rating

4 out of 5 Stars. A movie so dumb it actually becomes a masterpiece. I am well aware that it is garbage, but it is beautiful garbage.

Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

FBI Agent Sean Archer has spent years hunting down freelance terrorist Castor Troy. Troy killed Archer’s young son years ago, so Archer is very cranky about it. Archer finally catches Troy at an airport. Troy gets knocked into a coma, but right before that, he reveals he planted a massive bomb somewhere in Los Angeles. The only person who knows where the bomb is hidden is Troy’s brother, Pollux, who is in a high security prison.

To find out where the bomb is, Archer agrees to a top secret surgery to remove his own face and replace it with Troy’s face. He also gets the magic throat chip so he sounds like Troy. Archer goes into the prison looking like the terrorist to trick the brother into giving up the bomb location.

Of course, things go wrong. Troy wakes up from his coma without a face. He is understandably upset. He forces the surgical team to slap Archer’s face onto his head. Then he burns down the secret lab and kills everyone who knew about the mission. Now Troy looks like the FBI agent and goes home to live with Archer’s wife. Archer is stuck in a horrible prison looking like the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Archer eventually escapes from the prison. He meets up with Troy’s mobster friends and gets a bunch of guns. Meanwhile, Troy finds the bomb he planted himself and disarms it, making him look like a national hero. The two of them finally meet up for a massive shootout at a church full of pigeons. After killing about fifty people and blowing up the building, they chase each other on speedboats. Archer finally kills Troy with a speargun, gets his real face put back on, and goes home. He even adopts Troy’s kid at the end just to make things extra weird.

5 Famous Quotes

“I want to take his face… off.”

“I could eat a peach for hours.”

“It’s like looking in a mirror, only not.”

“Ready for the big ride, bubba?”

“I am Castor Troy!”

5 Interesting Facts

The movie was originally written for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. I would have paid good money to see those two try to act like each other.

The studio wanted to take the slash out of the title, but the director fought to keep it so people would not think it was a movie about ice hockey.

Nicolas Cage was terrified of heights, but they made him do a bunch of stunts up high anyway.

The director John Woo really loves pigeons. He put them in the church scene on purpose because he thinks they look cool flying around bullets.

Mark Wahlberg was offered the role of the annoying brother Pollux Troy, but he turned it down. Probably a smart move on his part.

Photos

Trailer

Review Notes:

This movie is so stupid that it circles all the way back around to being entertaining.

It starts with Cage playing an insane priest… not a stretch.

This opening action set piece in the airport is amazeballs.

You know whatever anyone wants to say about Nic Cage he goes 100 at all times. He makes Travolta look like Vinny Barbarino here as he just can’t keep up with Cage’s frenetic energy.

I’m not sure I have seen a movie with more good action.

Somehow this ridiculous movie comes around to be highly entertaining, just turn your brain off and enjoy.

If you are sick and tired of modern Hollywood serving up twenty different flavors of guys in spandex bouncing off green screens, streaming platforms finally have something with actual meat on its bones. Back in 1975, director Miloš Forman rounded up a bunch of scruffy guys, tossed them into a locked Oregon psychiatric ward, and made movie history. The premise sounds miserable on paper. A loudmouth convict tries to duck out of hard labor on a prison farm by faking insanity, only to find out the insane asylum is run by a woman with ice water in her veins who makes the prison warden look like a cuddly teddy bear.

It went on to sweep the “Big Five” Academy Awards, which almost never happens, and for good reason. It is raw, funny, completely uncomfortable, and about as far removed from today’s focus-grouped, TikTok-brained slop as humanly possible. If you have an attention span longer than twelve seconds and do not mind seeing what actual human drama looks like, dust off your remote, park your rear on the recliner, and give it a look.

Review by Ben Dover

Look, getting older means sitting down in front of a television, trying to navigate eight different subscription apps that all want fourteen dollars a month, and praying you find something where people actually act. My nephew tried to show me a video on his telephone last week of a teenager doing a dance in a grocery store aisle. I wanted to dropkick his phone out the kitchen window. So I fired up this 1975 classic to cleanse my palate, and let me tell you, Jack Nicholson back then had more wattage in his pinky finger than every pretty boy working in California today.

Nicholson plays Randle McMurphy, a swaggering, greasy brawler who thinks he found a country-club loophole out of chopping trees on a work farm. What he runs into instead is the mental health system of the 1960s, overseen by Nurse Ratched. Louise Fletcher plays her with a permanent, tight-lipped sneer that made my blood boil within ten minutes. She looks like the kind of woman who measures the grass on your front lawn with a plastic ruler just to complain to the homeowners association. The dynamic is perfection because McMurphy is not a saint. He is a scumbag, a gambler, and an instigator, but next to her, he looks like George Washington crossing the Delaware.

What gets me every single time is the supporting ward. These poor bastards are not even locked in there against their will for the most part. They checked themselves in because the outside world scared them half to death, and Ratched spends every afternoon chewing away at their leftover self-respect under the guise of therapy. You watch these broken souls, especially young Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit, and you just want to reach into the tube and slap some backbone into them. When McMurphy starts pushing them to watch the World Series, play basketball, and sneak women into the dorms, you cannot help but cheer. It is funny, crude, and deeply human.

Now, because I hate almost everything on principle, I still have bones to pick. The whole midnight party scene near the finish line drags out way longer than it needs to. McMurphy had about six clear opportunities to jump out the open window and run to Canada, but he sticks around to pass out drunk on the floor like an absolute moron. If you have a bus waiting to freedom, you do not sit down and drink rotgut wine until sunrise. It drove me nuts in 1975 and it drove me nuts last night.

Still, that ending hits like a sucker punch to the ribs. It is brutal, unfair, and completely earned, which is something nobody writing movies today knows how to pull off. They would probably slap a dance party or a post-credits setup for a sequel at the end. Not here. It is one of the all-time great American pictures, and if you do not like it, you probably spend six hours a day staring at your phone watching teenagers lip-sync to garbage.

Cast & Characters

• Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy: Pure lightning in a bottle. Nicholson plays the fast-talking, red-blooded troublemaker who refuses to be broken by a sterile hospital regime.
• Louise Fletcher as Nurse Mildred Ratched: The ultimate petty tyrant. She does not yell or wave weapons; she destroys your will to live with soft words, classical music, and mandatory medication schedules.
• Will Sampson as Chief Bromden: A gigantic Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute so nobody bothers him. Sampson has barely any dialogue for half the film, but his physical presence steals the whole show.
• Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit: A stuttering, terrified young man completely dominated by his mother and Nurse Ratched. Dourif earned an Oscar nomination for this, and his performance is so nervous it gives you secondary jitters.
• Danny DeVito as Martini: Before he was crawling out of leather couches on television, DeVito was playing this childlike, wide-eyed patient who just wants to play cards and laugh at McMurphy’s jokes.
• Christopher Lloyd as Max Taber: A jittery, hostile, chain-smoking live wire. It was Lloyd’s film debut, years before he was traveling through time in a sports car.
• Sydney Lassick as Charlie Cheswick: The neurotic, infantile patient who constantly demands his cigarettes and throws tantrums during group meetings.

Special Effects & Music

• Special Effects: Thank the good Lord, there are none of those fake-looking computer cartoons here. The only special effects are real human sweat, grease, stained wool knit caps, and some convincingly gruesome makeup when the doctors start rolling out the electric shock equipment and lobotomy tools. It looks dirty, lived-in, and authentic.
• Music: Jack Nitzsche did the score, and it is weird as hell in the best possible way. He uses an eerie, wailing musical saw alongside traditional instruments. It sounds like a ghost whistling inside an empty institutional hallway. It gets under your skin, keeps you uneasy, and fits the sterile terror of the ward like a glove.

Rating

4.5 out of 5 Stars

Think your boss is bad? Ben Dover reviews the movie that proved Nurse Ratched could make the devil himself ask for a transfer.

(I am knocking off half a star because McMurphy was an idiot who should have climbed out that window the second he got the chance, but otherwise it is near-flawless cinema.)

Synopsis & Plot Breakdown

Randle Patrick McMurphy arrives at an Oregon state mental institution in 1963 after being transferred from a prison work farm. The authorities suspect he may be feigning mental illness to avoid hard labor. Upon arrival, McMurphy discovers a ward rigidly dominated by the soft-spoken, iron-willed head administrative nurse, Mildred Ratched. She maintains order through routine, public humiliation disguised as group therapy, and heavy sedation.

McMurphy immediately clashes with Ratched’s authority. He befriends his fellow patients, including the stuttering youth Billy Bibbit, the paranoid Charlie Cheswick, and a towering Native American named Chief Bromden, whom everyone believes to be deaf and mute. McMurphy engages the ward in small acts of rebellion, such as gambling for cigarettes, teaching the men to play basketball, and demanding that the daily schedule be adjusted so they can watch the World Series. When Ratched refuses to let them watch the baseball game, McMurphy sits in front of a blank television set and enthusiastically hallucinates the play-by-play, whipping the entire ward into a roaring frenzy.

Things escalate when McMurphy discovers two critical facts: many of the patients are voluntary admits who could leave whenever they choose, and he is committed involuntarily, meaning Ratched controls when he gets released. Desperate to assert some freedom, McMurphy hijacks a hospital bus carrying the therapy group, picks up his girlfriend Candy, and takes the men on an unauthorized deep-sea fishing trip off the coast, restoring their confidence and dignity.

Following an altercation over rationed cigarettes, McMurphy and Cheswick fight the hospital orderlies. Chief Bromden steps in to defend McMurphy, revealing to McMurphy in private afterward that he can hear and speak perfectly well; he merely keeps quiet to stay out of trouble. McMurphy, Bromden, and Cheswick are subjected to electroconvulsive therapy as punishment.

Undeterred, McMurphy schemes with Bromden to escape to Canada. On his final night, McMurphy bribes the night watchman to sneak Candy, another woman, and contraband alcohol into the ward. The patients throw a wild, late-night party. McMurphy arranges for Billy Bibbit to lose his virginity to Candy. However, McMurphy and the others drink until they pass out, failing to escape before the morning shift arrives.

The next morning, Nurse Ratched enters to find the ward in total disarray. She discovers Billy with Candy and threatens to inform his overbearing mother. Overwhelmed by shame and terror, Billy commits suicide in a nearby office. Enraged by Billy’s death, McMurphy attacks Ratched, pinning her to the floor and nearly choking her to death before an orderly knocks him unconscious.

Days later, Ratched returns to duty wearing a neck brace, her authority deeply damaged. McMurphy is returned to the ward late at night, but Chief discovers that McMurphy has been given a surgical lobotomy, leaving him completely vegetative. Refusing to let his friend spend the rest of his life as a mindless trophy for the hospital staff, Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow to put him out of his misery. Chief then lifts a massive marble hydrotherapy console that McMurphy had earlier failed to budge, hurls it through the barred window, and runs into the wilderness toward freedom.

5 Famous Quotes

1. “Get out of the way, peckers, before I run you down!”
2. “Which one of you nuts has got any guts?”
3. “But I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.”
4. “M-M-M-Mister McMurphy, he did it. He d-d-danced with the nurses, and he made ’em laugh, and he helped us win our bet!”
5. “Nurse Ratched, Nurse Ratched! The man’s an absolute menace!”

5 Interesting Facts

1. Shot in an actual functioning mental institution: The movie was filmed on location at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon, and the hospital’s actual superintendent, Dr. Dean Brooks, even played McMurphy’s evaluating physician, Dr. Spivey.
2. Real patients were used as extras: Over eighty real patients from the Oregon State Hospital were hired to work on the production, serving as background extras and assisting crew members behind the scenes as part of an occupational therapy program.
3. The historic “Big Five” Oscar sweep: It became only the second film in history to sweep the five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay), following It Happened One Night in 1934.
4. Author Ken Kesey hated the adaptation: Ken Kesey, who wrote the original 1962 novel, despised the script because it stripped Chief Bromden of his role as the primary narrator, and he reportedly refused to ever watch the finished movie.
5. Jack Nicholson underwent real dental work for the role: To capture the look of a run-down, roughneck brawler, Nicholson had caps removed from his teeth to give himself a noticeably grungier, crooked smile throughout the shoot.

Photos

Trailer

Deep Dive into the movie

Deep Dive

https://entertainmentnutz.com/2026/10/23/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest-1975

Grab your remotes and clear your schedules, because tonight we are revisiting District 9, the gritty 2009 sci-fi flick directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson. Set in an alternate reality Johannesburg, the story follows an extraterrestrial mothership that broke down over South Africa in the 1980s, stranding over a million insect-like aliens on Earth. Decades later, these unwanted intergalactic squatters are shoved into a squalid slum, while a private military conglomerate tries to monetize their alien weaponry and evict them further out of town.

Enter Wikus van de Merwe, a pencil-pushing bureaucrat who gets sprayed by alien goo on eviction day and immediately starts morphing into one of the creatures he was trying to kick to the curb. What follows is a violent, manic blend of shaky-cam pseudo-documentary and full-blown Hollywood shoot-em-up. It is sharp, relentless, and completely unbothered by good manners, making it one of the most distinctive science fiction movies to come out of the 2000s.

Review by Ben Dover

Listen to me, people. I am sixty years old, I yell at kids when they park their electric scooters across my driveway, and I do not like people telling me what to watch. My nephew spent three weeks begging me to stream this on my flat-screen TV instead of watching my evening cable reruns. He kept using nonsense words like “metaphorical socio-political commentary.” Give me a break. It is a movie about giant bipedal roaches living in tin shacks and eating canned cat food. If you want a deep sociology class, go pay college tuition. But if you want to watch mercenaries get liquefied by lightning guns, sit your rear end down on the recliner.

Here is the thing that actually made me respect this movie: it does not hold your hand. Wikus van de Merwe starts the movie as an insufferable dork in a sweater vest who thinks eviction notices are polite business management. You want to punch him five minutes in. But when his arm turns into a grotesque shell claw and his own father-in-law tries to cut his organs out for profit, the guy suddenly grows a backbone. He is selfish, he screams like a maniac, he panics, and he betrays people before he finally decides to do the right thing. Modern movies love giving us pristine boy scouts who preach to the audience. Wikus is a flawed, panicking dirtbag, which makes him feel like an actual human being for once.

Now, do not get too excited, because I still hated plenty of it. First off, what is with this modern camera work? The cameraman runs around like he is having a sugar crash after eating five donuts. It is mockumentary style, then regular action movie, then news footage. Pick a style and stick with it, Blomkamp! I had to look away twice just so my dinner did not come back up. And the romance stuff with the wife crying on the rotary phone felt pasted in so the studio could pretend there was a tender side to an hour and a half of people exploding into strawberry jam.

Even with the motion sickness and the gross-out bodily fluids, this thing works because it has guts. It treats both the humans and the aliens like stubborn, selfish jerks who cannot get along, which is the most honest thing any sci-fi flick has done in forty years. It never gets soft, it never gets preachy, and it keeps moving like a freight train.

Cast & Characters

• Sharlto Copley as Wikus van de Merwe: Before this film, Copley was not even a working Hollywood actor, which explains why he feels so real and unpolished. He starts out as an annoying little bureaucrat who sucks up to his bosses and ends up running around Johannesburg covered in alien gunk.
• Jason Cope as Christopher Johnson:Cope provided the motion-capture and clicks for Christopher, the main alien who happens to possess the only functioning brain cell in the entire township.He also played the background TV reporters and several other characters.
• David James as Colonel Koobus Venter:A totally unhinged private security boss who lives to turn aliens into target practice. He is mean, nasty, and impossible to sympathize with, making him a blast to root against.
• Eugene Khumbanyiwa as Obesandjo: The local gang boss who trades firearms for canned cat food and wants to eat alien appendages to absorb their superpowers.
• Louis Minnaar as Piet Smit: Wikus’s cold-blooded father-in-law and the corporate executive who sells out Wikus the instant he realizes the guy’s DNA can fire alien weapons.

Special Effects & Music

The visual effects in this film embarrass Hollywood movies that cost three times as much. Made for around thirty million dollars, the digital models for the “Prawn” aliens actually carry tangible physical weight. They blend seamlessly into real sunlight, actual dust, and filthy garbage heaps without looking like plastic cartoon cutouts. When the heavy alien machinery and mechs show up in the third act, the mechanical action looks filthy and real.

The score by Clinton Shorter skips standard orchestral horns for tribal drums, taiko percussion, and dark synthesizers. It keeps the rhythm pounding and gives the shantytown a hot, chaotic atmosphere that never lets you relax.

Rating

4 out of 5 Stars

Forget tiny green men, these aliens will trade high-tech ray guns for a carton of Friskies.

Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

In 1982, a colossal extraterrestrial spacecraft halts over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. After weeks of dead silence, human crews cut inside to find a starving, leaderless population of insect-like aliens. The South African government herds them into a fenced encampment named District 9. Over the following decades, the shantytown deteriorates into an overcrowded slum ridden with crime, illegal black markets run by Nigerian gang leaders, and simmering hostility from human locals. The aliens, derogatorily dubbed “Prawns,” are hooked on canned cat food and restricted from modern society.

Multi-National United (MNU), a private defense contractor tasked with managing the camp, organizes an operation to evict roughly 1.8 million aliens to a remote concentration site called Sanctuary Park. Mild-mannered bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe is put in charge of the field eviction. While inspecting the shack of a Prawn named Christopher Johnson, Wikus discovers a concealed canister. As he tinkers with it, the container sprays a mysterious black fluid directly into his face. Christopher and his child had spent twenty painstaking years purifying that fluid to provide enough fuel to power a command shuttle hidden beneath their floorboards.

Wikus falls violently ill shortly after the spray. His fingernails fall out, he vomits dark bile, and following a seizure at his celebratory promotion party, he collapses. Hospital staff cut away his bandages to discover his left arm has fully mutated into an alien claw. MNU immediately detains him. Company scientists quickly discover that alien weapons, which rely on extraterrestrial biology to activate, fire perfectly for Wikus. Recognizing that his unique DNA represents billions of dollars in weapon value, MNU director Piet Smit authorizes him to be vivisected.

Desperate for survival, Wikus fights his way out of the medical lab and escapes into the only place where security forces cannot easily hunt him: District 9. Meanwhile, MNU launches a smear campaign across national news, falsely claiming Wikus has contracted an alien venereal disease. In the camp, Wikus hides out with Nigerian gangsters, escapes their attempt to butcher his arm, and stumbles into Christopher Johnson’s home. Seeing the command craft under the floor, Wikus agrees to help Christopher retrieve the fuel canister from the fortified MNU headquarters in exchange for Christopher using his ship’s medical systems to reverse his mutation.

Arming themselves with black-market alien weapons, Wikus and Christopher storm the MNU complex, slaughtering security forces and recovering the fuel canister. Back in the slum, Christopher hooks the fuel into the escape module, but discloses that he must return to the alien homeworld to seek help for his enslaved people before he can treat Wikus, meaning a delay of three years. Infuriated, Wikus knocks Christopher unconscious and tries to fly the shuttle himself. Mercenary commander Koobus Venter shoots the module down, capturing Wikus and Christopher.

Before the convoy can leave, Nigerian gangsters ambush them and take Wikus hostage. Christopher’s young son remotely activates the shuttle systems, powering on a heavily armed bipedal alien mech suit inside the gang’s headquarters. Wikus clambers into the cockpit, obliterates the gangsters, and initially runs away. Overcome by conscience, he turns around to save Christopher from execution by MNU soldiers. Wikus uses the mech suit to slaughter Venter’s mercenaries, buying Christopher and his son enough time to reach the shuttle. Venter disables the mech, but before he can execute Wikus, a horde of neighborhood Prawns swarms Venter and tears him to pieces. Christopher and his boy dock with the massive mothership and depart into space, leaving District 9 behind. In the aftermath, the camp is dismantled, Wikus’s assistant exposes MNU’s horrific illegal experiments, and a fully transformed Wikus lives secretly in the new camp, fashioning metal roses out of scrap metal and leaving them on his wife’s porch.

5 Famous Quotes

1. “When dealing with aliens, try to be polite, but firm. And always remember that a smile is cheaper than a bullet.”
2. “Is that tear gas? No, it’s cat food!”
3. “I mean, you can’t say they don’t look like that, that’s what they look like, right? They look like prawns.”
4. “I will come back for you. Three years, I promise.”
5. “I never had sex with a creature! I would never have sex with any creature!”

5 Notes & Interesting Facts

• Born from a Failed Video Game: Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson originally intended to make an adaptation of the video game Halo. When the funding collapsed, Jackson handed Blomkamp the remaining resources and told him to adapt his 2005 short film Alive in Joburg instead.
• Real-Life Apartheid History:The title and storyline directly mirror Cape Town’s District Six, a residential area declared “whites only” in 1966 that saw over 60,000 residents forcibly evicted by the South African government.
• Shot in an Actual Shantytown: The District 9 sets were filmed in Chiawelo, an impoverished section of Soweto, during a real eviction and re-housing program, which gave the dust, debris, and tin roofs authentic grit.
• Massive Improvised Dialogue: Sharlto Copley had zero professional acting credits before landing the lead role. He and director Blomkamp improvised almost all of Wikus’s nervous interviews and ramblings without a traditional locked script.
• The Cat Food Addiction: The aliens’ obsession with canned cat food was inspired by the real Parktown prawn, a large king cricket native to South Africa that often enters houses and eats pet food.

Photos

Trailer

If your idea of a thrilling Friday night involves watching paint peel off walls while five sweaty handymen whine about their feelings, then clear your schedule. Brad Anderson’s 2001 psychological snooze-fest Session 9 has shambled its way onto home streaming platforms. It dares to ask the age-old question: what happens when you stick a crew of asbestos-removal workers inside an abandoned mental asylum and forget to write an actual plot for the first seventy minutes?

Set inside the sprawling, mold-infested ruins of the real Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, the film attempts to substitute crumbling masonry and rusty gurneys for genuine human suspense. Instead of monsters or a proper slasher, you get David Caruso glaring through a pair of cheap sunglasses and a guy obsessively playing cassette tapes while ignoring his day job. Grab an extra cup of black coffee before pressing play, because you are going to need it.

Review by Ben Dover

I am sixty years old, my lower back throbs whenever the weather changes, and I simply do not have the time or the patience to sit through another slow-burn indie movie where literally nothing burns. People on the internet talk about Session 9 like it is a lost crown jewel of atmospheric horror. What a load of absolute garbage. This whole thing feels less like a horror movie and more like a mandatory six-hour OSHA workplace safety seminar filmed on a bargain-bin camcorder by someone who failed art school.

The story kicks off with five miserable guys in jumpsuits who get hired to scrape poisonous crud out of an old lunatic asylum in five days. That is the whole premise. Right away, you can tell the director thought the building would do all his homework for him. Sure, the asylum looks dirty and decrepit, but after twenty minutes of looking at rusted pipes, empty hallways, and water-damaged plaster, I got the message. I don’t need eighty more minutes of guys shuffling down corridors with flashlights looking like they just lost their car keys.

Then we have the acting, which swings wildly between dead-eyed muttering and pure soap opera melodrama. David Caruso treats every single line delivery as if he is trying to win an award for the grumpiest guy in New England. There is one scene where he drops an F-bomb with his sunglasses off, and it is so stiff and cartoonish I nearly choked on my dentures laughing at him. Meanwhile, the lead guy, Gordon, looks like he swallowed a lemon in every single scene. The characters are completely unlikable losers. Why on earth would I care if a bunch of whiny guys who hate each other get picked off in a basement?

Modern audiences love to hype this flick up because it tricks you into thinking it is deep and philosophical. It isn’t deep. It just takes cheap psychological mumbo-jumbo and drags it out until your legs fall asleep. You sit through an hour and a half of guys digging up loose change and listening to crackly therapy tapes just to get hit with a tired twist ending you could see coming from three counties away.

In the end, Session 9 is a colossal waste of ninety minutes that gives you nothing to chew on except dust and regret. If I wanted to watch a bunch of grumpy, underpaid laborers shout at each other inside a crumbling wreck of a building, I would just invite my brother-in-law over to fix my porch. Save your eyesight and go watch something where things actually happen.

Cast & Characters

• David Caruso (Phil): The bitter, chain-smoking ex-partner of the business who is stewing in pure resentment because Gordon stole his girlfriend. Caruso plays Caruso, complete with dramatic squints and tough-guy scowls, but here the jerk attitude actually fits like a glove. He spends ninety percent of his screen time squinting into the middle distance and delivering every line like an angry gym coach.
• Peter Mullan (Gordon Fleming): The weary, sleep-deprived owner of the hazmat crew. Mullan is fantastic at looking like a man whose soul left his body three weeks ago. Between a newborn baby at home and mountain-high debts, he is a walking nervous breakdown. He walks around with an expression that suggests he hasn’t had a solid bowel movement since 1998, mumbling his lines and constantly rubbing his temples.
• Stephen Gevedon (Mike): A law-school dropout who works the job just to kill time. He finds a box of therapy reel-to-reel tapes documenting a patient with multiple personalities and spends half his work shift secretly listening to them instead of scraping pipes.
• Josh Lucas (Hank): The handsome, arrogant loudmouth of the crew who talks trash, gambles too much, and stumbles upon a secret stash of antique silver and valuable coins hidden behind a crematorium wall. He spends his shift sneaking around looking for things to steal and predictably gets what is coming to him early on.
• Brendan Sexton III (Jeff): Gordon’s skittish nephew who has a mortal fear of the dark. Naturally, he gets assigned to work in pitch-black tunnels. The kid spends the whole movie looking like he is about to cry into his sandwich. Since Caruso wont, he wears sunglasses indoors and screams like a frightened toddler the moment a lightbulb flickers.

Special Effects & Music

• Special Effects: What special effects? The entire budget clearly went into renting the asylum and buying cheap paper suits from the hardware store. There is almost zero blood, the makeup looks like leftover greasepaint from a high school play, and the big scares rely on flickering lights and shaky handheld camera tricks that give you a headache. The decaying set does all the heavy lifting.
• Music & Sound: The sound design is downright nasty. Composers Climax Golden Twins provide a low, droning, metallic ambient score that sounds like someone dragging a pipe across concrete in an empty room. Layer that with the scratchy, crackling playback of the reel-to-reel psychiatric tapes, and the audio alone will give you the creeps.

Rating

1 out of 5 Stars – Think your day job is torture? Try watching David Caruso scowl in a paper jumpsuit for an hour and a half.

It had two stars purely out of respect for the construction crew who had to clean up that filthy building after the film crew packed their junk and left, but it loses a full star because Caruso’s dramatic tough-guy scream made me spill my ginger ale.

Complete Synopsis & Plot Breakdown

Gordon Fleming runs a struggling hazmat abatement company in Massachusetts. Desperate for cash to support his wife and infant daughter, Gordon bids on a massive contract to clear hazardous asbestos from the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital. To beat out his competitors, he recklessly promises to finish a three-week cleanup in just five days. He gathers his crew: his resentful former partner Phil, law school dropout Mike, the reckless hotshot Hank, and his nervous young nephew Jeff.

As work begins on Monday, Gordon is clearly unraveling from stress and lack of sleep. While exploring the basement, Mike discovers a box of audio recordings containing nine taped psychiatric sessions from 1974. The tapes chronicle Dr. Wooding treating Mary Hobbes, a young woman who was committed after committing a violent murder at her family home. Mary suffers from multiple personalities, including a timid girl named Princess and a protective boy named Billy.

Meanwhile, Hank discovers a hidden cavity behind a basement wall containing antique half-dollars and surgical silverware. He sneaks back into the asylum alone late Monday night to steal the loot, but while stuffing his pockets, he hears a strange noise and is attacked in the dark by an unseen figure.

By Tuesday, Hank is missing. Phil assumes he took the money and skipped town. The pressure mounts, and Gordon’s mental stability deteriorates further. Mike continues listening to Mary’s therapy tapes in secret, completely fascinated by her references to a mysterious, hidden third personality that Dr. Wooding has not yet unlocked.

On Thursday, Hank suddenly wanders back into the building in broad daylight, dazed, shirtless, and completely catatonic with a tiny patch of tape on his eye. Chaos erupts. Jeff panics during a power outage in the pitch-black basement tunnels and is violently stabbed to death with an industrial lobotomy needle. Phil confronts Gordon, realizing something is terribly wrong, but is ambushed and murdered. Mike heads down to the basement to shut off the generator, finds Hank dead on a gurney with a needle through his eye, and is struck down from behind.

The final reel-to-reel recording, Session 9, plays in full. In the recording, Dr. Wooding finally wakes Mary’s dominant, homicidal alter ego, who identifies himself as “Simon.”

A series of grim flashbacks reveals the horrifying truth: Gordon did not just snap at the hospital. On the previous weekend, before the job even started, Gordon accidentally burned his leg with boiling water at home, lost his mind, and murdered his wife, their baby daughter, and the family dog in a blind rage. Driven by complete psychological denial, Gordon showed up to work, hallucinated calls with his dead wife, and proceeded to systematically slaughter his entire crew one by one under the influence of the “Simon” personality.

The film ends with a broken Gordon sitting alone in the asylum, staring blankly as the voice of Simon echoes in his head. When the doctor on the tape asks Simon where he lives, Simon chillingly whispers: “I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.”

5 Famous Quotes

1. “Hey… fuck you!”
2. “I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc.”
3. “Do you know what happened, Mary? Do you know what you did?”
4. “It’s the place. It’s got something to do with the place.”
5. “Hello, Gordon.”

Notes & Interesting Facts

1. The Asylum Was 100% Real: The movie was shot on location at the actual Danvers State Hospital, an infamous Kirkbride-style asylum built in 1878 that was rumored to be the birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy and the real-world inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitarium.
2. Real Hazards on Set: The crew had to wear actual protective equipment during parts of the shoot because the abandoned facility was genuinely contaminated with airborne asbestos and dangerous black mold.
3. Pioneering Digital Video: It was one of the earliest feature horror films shot entirely on the Sony HDW-F900 24p high-definition digital camera, the exact same camera George Lucas used around the same time to film Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.
4. Demolished for Condos: In 2006, just five years after the movie came out, most of the historic Danvers complex was torn down by developers to build an apartment complex, though a mysterious massive fire burned down much of the remaining active construction site during the process.
5. No Special Effects Budget: The entire production budget was under two million dollars, meaning director Brad Anderson had to rely almost entirely on available sunlight, practical props, and genuine building decay rather than movie sets.
6. Box Office Flop: Despite gathering a niche cult following on home video years later, the film bombed hard during its original theatrical run, pulling in less than 400,000 dollars at the box office.

Photos

Just for fun here is David Caruso telling you exactly how he feels

Trailer

If you enjoy bleak gray dirt, rusty junk, and burlap potato sacks running around in fear for seventy-nine straight minutes, Hollywood has cooked up something special for you. Directed by Shane Acker and slapped with Tim Burton’s name on the posters so people might actually buy a ticket, the 2009 animated oddity “9” takes audiences into an apocalyptic wasteland where humanity was completely wiped out by its own mechanical toys. Now, only nine little stitch-and-zipper ragdoll puppets remain to wander the scorched ruins.

Expanding on Acker’s Oscar-nominated 2005 student short film, the full-length feature promises a visually staggering, steampunk-fueled nightmare packed with terrifying mechanical beasts, razor blades, and existential dread. Audiences looking for singing snowmen or talking cartoon squirrels will need to look elsewhere, because this grim PG-13 survival story is aimed squarely at older crowds who appreciate gothic atmosphere and bleak mechanical destruction.

Review by Ben Dover

I sat down on my recliner, clicked on my streaming app, and pulled up this movie called “9.” That is the whole title. Just the single digit 9. Back in my day, people took the time to name a picture something with a little grit, like The Dirty Dozen or High Noon. Now we get single digits. The movie came out in theaters on September 9, 2009, which means some hotshot marketing kid got paid half a million bucks just to match the calendar date to the poster. My back hurts just thinking about the boardroom meeting where everybody clapped for that nonsense.

The story is about a bunch of little burlap ragdolls called stitchpunks running around a bombed-out city that looks like my garage after my brother-in-law borrowed my socket set. Apparently mankind built a gigantic thinking machine to solve all their problems, and big surprise, the machine decided humans were annoying and gassed everyone into oblivion. You kids today are glued to your smart screens and talking to computer gadgets in your kitchens, so you might want to pay attention. You think your fancy robotic vacuum cleaner loves you? Give it two years and a couple wheels of steel and it will be hunting you down in the hallway like these metal crabs in the movie.

The main doll is voiced by Elijah Wood, who plays the newly awakened number 9. The kid wakes up in a dusty lab, finds a bunch of older dolls hiding out in a ruined cathedral, and immediately ignores the elder doll in charge to poke his nose into places it does not belong. Number 1, voiced by Christopher Plummer, is an old grump in a pope hat who just wants everyone to stay hidden, keep their mouths shut, and survive. Naturally, the movie paints him as a cowardly jerk. Let me tell you something: Number 1 was entirely right. The moment 9 shows up, he starts pushing strange glowing junk into ancient outlets and wakes up the mother of all killer robot contraptions. If 9 had just sat down on a church pew and kept his hands to himself, half his buddies wouldn’t have had their souls vacuumed out of their eyeballs.

What drives me nuts about modern filmmakers is that they think pretty junk moving fast can replace actual heart. The movie looks terrific if you enjoy brown mud, green smoke, and twisted sheet metal, but these puppets don’t have enough personality to fill a shot glass. You barely learn their names, which is just as well because their names are literally numbers. “Oh no, look out, 2 got grabbed! 5 is crying! 7 did a backflip!” I felt like I was watching someone call out bingo numbers at the Elks Lodge while an angry vacuum cleaner terrorized the buffet table. It is eighty minutes long, which is a blessing because my attention span for talking pincushions ends around the one-hour mark.

Still, credit where it is due: the mechanical monsters are actually pretty terrifying. There is this snake thing with a porcelain baby doll face and sewing needles for hands called the Seamstress that made me double-check the locks on my back door. It is original, it doesn’t insult you with goofy pop songs, and it doesn’t waste time on potty jokes. It is just too sour and thin on story to be a real classic. If you like dark cartoons and feeling mildly depressed while staring at rusty gears, go right ahead and stream it.

Cast and Characters

• Elijah Wood (9): The new kid on the block who wakes up without a voice box, finds a brass zipper, and decides he needs to lead everybody on a suicide mission. Wood does his usual wide-eyed, breathless hero routine, sounding like he just jogged up a flight of stairs.
• John C. Reilly (5): A sweet, one-eyed doll who acts as the loyal mechanic and assistant. He is the only character who feels like a regular guy you wouldn’t mind having a beer with, which means bad things are guaranteed to happen to him.
• Christopher Plummer (1): The self-appointed ruler of the group wearing velvet robes and a tin-can crown. Plummer brings old-school theatrical gravitas to a burlap sack, barking orders and acting like every sensible retired person dealing with reckless kids.
• Jennifer Connelly (7): The badass rebel warrior of the group who wears a bird skull on her head and leaps off roofs with two daggers. Connelly gives her enough grit to convince you this tiny doll could split a mechanical cat in half.
• Martin Landau (2): The frail old inventor who wanders out into the wasteland with a candle strapped to his noggin and immediately gets captured. Landau gives him a warm, fragile grandfather energy that makes you mad when he gets into trouble.
• Crispin Glover (6): The resident artist who sits in the corner obsessively drawing the same round key symbol with ink-stained pen nibs for fingers. He sounds totally nuts, which means Glover didn’t have to do much acting at all.
• Fred Tatasciore (8): The giant muscle-headed bodyguard doll with a giant cleaver who eats magnetic junk for fun. Tatasciore just grunts, flexes, and acts like every bouncer who ever kicked my buddies out of a bowling alley lounge.

Special Effects and Animation

Shane Acker built this world with an incredible eye for junk-drawer realism. The textures on the burlap, the loose threads, the brass grommets, and the oily gears look tangible enough that you can almost smell the rust and motor oil. The mechanical monsters look like someone took old farm equipment, sewing kits, and surgical knives and turned them into walking nightmares. The action scenes move fast without turning into a digital blur, and the lighting in the decaying city ruins looks great. It is top-shelf animation that avoids looking like plastic toys.

Music and Score

Deborah Lurie handled the primary orchestral score, with Danny Elfman pitching in for the main themes. It does the job with heavy brass, gothic strings, and pounding metallic percussion that matches all the stomping war machines. The real musical highlight of the whole film is an old scratchy 78-RPM phonograph record playing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” right in the middle of a bombed-out room. That one scene has more genuine atmosphere than half the dialogue in the rest of the flick.

Ben Dover’s Rating

3 out of 5 Stars

9 is a cozy family picture for anyone who thinks their room is just missing rusty scrap metal and nightmare puppets. It is visually impressive and wonderfully dark, but the characters have about as much emotional depth as an actual burlap bag. Worth a watch for the monster designs and short runtime, but don’t expect to care when the stuffing starts flying.

Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

In an alternate post-apocalyptic world, humanity was wiped out in a massive war between mankind and the Fabrication Machine, an artificially intelligent behemoth built to manufacture industrial tools that was corrupted by a tyrannical dictator for military conquest. When the machine rebelled, its toxic gas and mechanical monstrosities exterminated every human being on the planet. In his dying days, the brilliant Scientist who created the machine used an ancient alchemical talisman to infuse pieces of his own soul into nine small, hand-crafted homunculi made of fabric and scrap parts.

The story begins as doll 9 wakes up on the Scientist’s laboratory workbench in the ruined city. Taking the mysterious talisman with him, 9 ventures outside and meets 2, an elderly tinkerer who crafts him a speaking device. Moments later, the pair are ambushed by the Cat Beast, a stalking quadruped robot made of bones and iron. The beast grabs 2 along with the talisman and drags him across the ruins. Collapsing from exhaustion, 9 is rescued by 5, a timid, one-eyed mechanic, who takes him to a grand ruined cathedral where the remaining survivors live.

At the sanctuary, 9 meets 1, the pompous elder who demands strict isolation to preserve what little life remains, guarded by his hulking brute enforcer, 8. 9 also encounters 6, an unhinged visionary doll whose fingers are pen nibs, constantly drawing the circular pattern from the talisman. Despite 1’s strict orders to hide, 9 convinces 5 to accompany him on a rescue mission to the factory ruins to save 2.

At the factory, the two discover 2 held captive in a cage. Before they can escape, the Cat Beast attacks again. Just as the beast corners them, 7, a nimble warrior doll wearing a skull helmet, arrives and slays the creature. Curious about a socket matching the talisman on a massive dormant apparatus, 9 inserts the device. The talisman immediately activates the slumbering Fabrication Machine. The awakened monster grabs 2 and absorbs his soul through the talisman, killing him instantly while 9, 5, and 7 barely escape.

The surviving dolls regroup at a derelict library where twin mute archivists, 3 and 4, reside. Using old film reels and documents, the twins reveal the history of the war, the Scientist, and the dictator. Meanwhile, the Fabrication Machine constructs a flying predator called the Winged Beast to hunt down the dolls. The beast attacks the cathedral, sparking a brutal fight that ends when 7 and 9 manage to bring down a chandelier, decapitating the mechanical bird.

Undeterred, the Fabrication Machine uses 2’s dead body to build the Seamstress, a terrifying serpent-like robot with a porcelain doll mask and sewing needles. The Seamstress infiltrates the sanctuary, hypnotic and stealthy, and captures both 8 and 7, hauling them back to the factory. The remaining dolls mount a desperate offensive. 9 sneaks inside to free 7, but 8’s soul is consumed by the machine before they can rescue him. To kill the machine, the dolls roll an oil barrel into the factory and detonate it, engulfing the entire facility in a roaring fireball.

Believing the monster destroyed, the dolls celebrate, but the scorched machine rises from the burning rubble and attacks. In the ensuing retreat across a rickety bridge, 5 sacrifices himself to buy the others time, and his soul is drained. 6 is subsequently caught and consumed, but before dying, he cryptically tells 9 to return to “the source” and study the drawings. Realizing the machine is linked to their creation, 9 races back to the Scientist’s workshop. There, he uncovers a holographic message left behind by the Scientist, explaining that the nine dolls hold fragments of his own human soul and that the talisman is the only tool capable of extracting those souls back from the machine.

Armed with the truth, 9 returns to the battlefield where the machine has trapped 1 and 7. Number 1 redeems himself by willingly sacrificing his life to distract the machine, allowing 9 to leap onto the monster’s core, retrieve the talisman, and reverse its power. The talisman drains the stolen souls out of the machine, overloading the metal beast and destroying it once and for all.

In the aftermath, the four surviving dolls—9, 7, 3, and 4—gather to mourn their fallen comrades. 9 activates the talisman to release the souls of 1, 2, 5, 6, and 8 into the sky. The five glowing lights ascend into the atmosphere, causing rain to fall upon the barren earth. As water drops splash onto the ground, tiny glowing micro-organisms appear inside the puddles, revealing that life has finally returned to the world.

5 Famous Quotes

1. 1: “Why should I risk us for them? They are fools, stirring up things best left undisturbed!”
2. 2: “We are not alone. There are others… you must find them.”
3. 6: “Go back… back to the source. The source! It holds the answer!”
4. 9: “We woke it up. It’s our job to put an end to it.”
5. The Scientist: “Our world is ending, but life must go on. I have poured our essence into you.”

5 Interesting Movie Notes

1. Born as a Student Project: The feature film originated as an eleven-minute, dialogue-free computer-animated short created by Shane Acker over four and a half years while studying at the UCLA Animation Workshop. The short was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.
2. Tim Burton’s Involvement: Director Tim Burton discovered the original short film at an awards screening and was so taken by the visual world that he teamed up with Russian action director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) to help finance and produce the feature-length adaptation.
3. Voice Overhaul: While the original short had zero spoken dialogue and relied entirely on pantomime and sound effects, the studio insisted on hiring high-profile Hollywood voice talent, including Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly, to make the complex post-apocalyptic narrative easier for general audiences to follow.
4. Pamela Pettler’s Script: The screenplay was written by Pamela Pettler, who had previously demonstrated a knack for spooky stop-motion writing with Burton’s Corpse Bride and Sony’s Monster House.
5. Heavy Metal Steampunk Terminology: Shane Acker coined the term “stitchpunk” specifically to describe the unique visual aesthetic of the characters, distinguishing their cloth, needles, and zipper construction from traditional Victorian brass-and-leather steampunk.

Photos

Trailer

If Hollywood loves anything more than charging twenty bucks for stale popcorn, it is falling completely head over heels for a charming criminal. Roofman brings the stranger-than-fiction true saga of Jeffrey Manchester to the screen. Manchester was an eccentric army veteran turned serial robber who earned his goofy moniker by slicing through the roofs of over forty McDonald’s locations nationwide, gently herding terrified graveyard shift employees into walk-in freezers, and raiding the registers without firing a single bullet.

Directed by Derek Cianfrance, this bizarre slice of Americana chronicles Manchester’s notorious run, his dramatic prison escape, and the six absurd months he spent secretly living inside a Charlotte, North Carolina Toys “R” Us. While camping out on baby food and riding motorized Power Wheels after hours, he somehow managed to fall in love with a regular churchgoing employee. It promises an odd blend of suburban heist, offbeat comedy, and improbable romance, but whether audiences buy into a bandit with a sweet tooth remains to be seen.

Review by Ben Dover

Listen up, because I am only going to say this once. I sat through this whole thing on my couch because getting off my rear end to reach the remote felt like too much work, and frankly, I have questions. First off, why are we supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy about a deadbeat who robs fast-food joints from the ceiling? Back in my day, if a guy dropped through the plaster of a McDonald’s at two in the morning, nobody wrote a country song about his golden heart. The cops dragged him away, and people went back to wondering why the ice cream machine was permanently broken. Now suddenly he is a misunderstood folk hero because he told the frightened staff to put on a jacket before locking them next to frozen burger patties. Give me a break.

Channing Tatum plays this clown, and look, Tatum is a decent enough actor when he is not doing pelvic thrusts for screaming housewives, but he is built like an industrial refrigerator. You expect me to believe this two-hundred-pound slab of beef was silently scuttling across flimsy ceiling tiles like a ninja squirrel without crashing directly into the French fryer? It looks ridiculous. The whole movie bends over backward trying to make him adorable. He hides out in a Toys “R” Us, plays with action figures, exercises on bicycles in the aisle, and eats snacks. I don’t get today’s obsession with grown adults acting like nine-year-olds. Go look at TikTok or whatever nonsense the kids stare at on their little pocket glass computers; it is just endless twenty-somethings crying in toy aisles. Apparently Hollywood thought, hey, let’s turn that into a two-hour crime flick!

Then comes the love story. He falls for Kirsten Dunst, who plays a divorced mom working at the toy store. Dunst is fine because she is an actual actress who knows how to behave like a normal human being, but the premise makes my head hurt. She meets a creepy drifter who shows up at her church with zero history and a trunk full of hot toys, and she thinks, “Yep, that is father material for my kids.” What kind of world are we living in? When I was dating, if a guy gave your daughter a stolen bicycle out of the back of a van, you called the sheriff, not a wedding planner. But here we get soft lighting, sweet acoustic guitar strums, and lingering stares across the aisle of plush stuffed animals. It made me want to gag.

The worst part is, the movie actually works in spite of its mushy nonsense. When Manchester is pulling off the actual capers, slicing through aluminum decking, scoping out grease traps, and outsmarting mall security guards, it is pretty clever. Cianfrance knows how to shoot the gritty details without drowning everything in dark, murky lighting like every other streaming show that expects you to squint at shadows for three hours. The pacing does not drag, and you actually care whether this idiot gets caught, even though your brain is screaming that he belongs in a cage.

So yeah, I liked it more than I wanted to, which really ticks me off. It romanticizes a lunatic, ignores the trauma of minimum-wage drive-thru workers, and panders to the idea that love fixes pure stupidity. But it is entertaining, well-acted, and kept me from falling asleep before eight o’clock. If you can stomach Channing Tatum pretending to be a sweet, misunderstood suburban cat burglar, you will probably have a decent night on the sofa.

Cast and Characters

• Channing Tatum as Jeffrey Manchester: Tatum turns on every ounce of boyish charisma he has to make a serial armed robber look like a stray golden retriever. He is too big to fit through most drop ceilings, but he carries the film with an earnest, goofy charm that almost makes you forget his character is completely unhinged, his chemistry with Kirsten Dunst is a major highlight.
• Kirsten Dunst as Leigh Wainscott: Dunst plays the toy store worker and struggling single mom who falls for Manchester without realizing he lives behind the bicycle racks. She brings real gravity and heart to what could have been a totally unbelievable, gullible character.
• Peter Dinklage: Shows up as a tough, suspicious store manager who senses something is severely off in the stockroom. Dinklage does what he always does: walks in, steals whatever scene he is in with pure deadpan grit, and leaves.
• Ben Mendelsohn: Plays a weary, dry law enforcement investigator tracking Manchester’s rooftop spree. Mendelsohn could play an exhausted chain-smoking detective in his sleep, and he provides a nice dose of reality to counter the lovey-dovey fluff.

Special Effects and Music

Do not expect computer-generated aliens blowing up monuments here, thank goodness. The effects are practical, tactile, and grounded: real saws cutting through tin roofs, genuine falls through broken ceiling plaster, and tight, claustrophobic camera work inside crawl spaces. When a stuntman hits the kitchen linoleum, you feel it in your lower back.

The musical score stays largely out of the way, leaning into low-key roots rock, subtle acoustic tracks, and era-appropriate early-2000s radio pop when the characters are strolling through big-box retail aisles. It suits the strange, small-town atmosphere without beating you over the head with an orchestra trying to tell you when to cry.

Rating

4 out of 5 Stars

(Lost a star because nobody should ever root for a guy who turns a toy store into a guest house.)

It holds an 87% Tomatometer score and is praised as a sweet, offbeat crime dramedy.

Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

The film opens in the late 1990s as Jeffrey Manchester, a former Army reservist with tactical training and an empty bank account, devises an unconventional criminal playbook. Recognizing that fast-food restaurants maintain weak roof construction and predictably stash cash overnight, he begins staking out McDonald’s franchises. Manchester climbs onto the roofs via supply ladders, cuts square access holes with cordless power tools, drops into the kitchens during opening or closing hours, and calmly rounds up the terrified staff using an unloaded firearm. True to his polite persona, he forces them into walk-in refrigerators but insists they put on winter coats first, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars without firing a single shot.

The law eventually catches up to him after a sloppy escape in North Carolina. Manchester is convicted and handed a lengthy prison sentence. Unwilling to spend decades behind bars, he stages an ingenious prison escape by slipping underneath a flatbed delivery truck leaving the facility grounds.

Now an escaped fugitive with no money and federal marshals hunting him down, Manchester hides in plain sight in Charlotte, North Carolina. He slips into an expansive Toys “R” Us store and builds a secret crawl space living quarter between elevated shelving units and wall cavities. By day, he sleeps silently above the ceiling; by night, he roams the deserted aisles, surviving on baby food, snacks, and soda, while passing the time riding motorized toddler toys and watching videotapes in the employee break room.

While skulking around the store, he becomes infatuated with Leigh Wainscott, a kind-hearted, deeply religious employee raising children on a slim paycheck. Taking the alias “John,” Manchester starts frequenting Leigh’s church. He cleans up, acts as a model gentleman, and gradually wins her trust, eventually showering her and her children with lavish gifts and toys that he simply steals off her employer’s shelves after closing hours.

As their relationship deepens, Manchester’s paranoia grows. To finance a real life with Leigh and keep up his wealthy facade, he begins planning a break-in at a neighboring Circuit City electronics superstore. The authorities, led by dogged local detectives, finally begin piecing together strange store inventory shortages and unexplained after-hours security tripped alarms.

Manchester’s double life collapses when a routine check uncovers his hidden lair in the toy store attic, complete with fresh footprints on the roof and his stash of weapons. Recognizing his time is up, he tries to pull off one last desperate rooftop exit, but law enforcement swarms the perimeter. Cornered without any escape hatch left, Manchester is arrested and sent back to federal custody, leaving Leigh shattered and the local community stunned that the phantom on the roof had been living right above their toy aisle all along.

5 Famous Quotes from the Movie

“Put the heavy winter jackets on first. Nobody needs to catch pneumonia over forty-five hundred dollars.”

“A locked door is a wall. A roof is just a suggestion.”

“You spend six months sleeping next to plush giraffes, and regular life starts looking like a bad dream.”

“He didn’t hurt a soul, Detective. He just fell through the ceiling like some twisted, bearded Santa Claus.”

“You think you know a man, and then you find out his address is Shelf 4B above the Power Wheels.”

5 Notes and Interesting Facts

• The Real Lair Was Shockingly Elaborate: In real life, Jeffrey Manchester did not just sleep on a board; he set up a fully furnished room inside the Charlotte toy store featuring posters on the walls, a baby monitor security system aimed at store offices, and a workout station.
• Dental Hygiene Brought Him Down: Manchester was extremely meticulous about leaving zero fingerprints, but investigators eventually matched his DNA from dental floss and discarded toothpicks he left behind in his secret ceiling bunker.
• The Gun Was Unloaded: Manchester carried a real firearm during his rooftop robberies to ensure compliance, but military records and later confessions confirmed he deliberately kept the chamber empty so he would never accidentally harm a worker.
• A Real Robin Hood Complex: During his months living undetected in the store, Manchester frequently took toys off the shelves, wrapped them up, and dropped them into community charity bins or gave them to low-income neighborhood families.
• Cianfrance’s Non-Traditional Scripting: Director Derek Cianfrance encouraged Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst to improvise their church and dating scenes to create an awkward, genuine small-town courtship rather than a slick Hollywood romance.

Photos

Trailer

Box Office Performance

• Theatrical Run: The film grossed roughly $32 million to $34 million worldwide against a production budget of around $18 million to $20 million. 
• Financial Status: Because theatrical grosses generally need to double the production budget just to break even after marketing and theater split costs, its $22.7 million domestic finish led many to label its theatrical run an underwhelming box-office disappointment or modest performer. 

Critical and Streaming Success

• Critical Reception: The film earned an impressive 86% to 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with strong praise for the lead performances by Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst. 
• Home Viewing: Following its theatrical exit, the movie quickly rebounded, surging to become the number-one streaming title on Paramount+ and performing well across digital rental platforms.

Notes

It’s crazy how we root for this guy however I will say had they not given a non violent criminal such a harsh sentence in the first place none of it would have happened. He needed a 12 month rehab type sentence, we really have it backwards in America with how we handle criminals early on.  If Jeffrey was a murderer or child molester probably would’ve got probation 

I spent half the movie thinking how devastating for the families and friends he made etc, but they all seemed Ok in the post credit scenes.

The Real Story Behind Roofman

The bizarre plot of Roofman is ripped straight from local police blotters and federal case files, centering on the real-life criminal career of Jeffrey Allen Manchester.

The McDonald’s Spree and “Roofman” Moniker

Manchester was a former U.S. Army paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, where he picked up tactical breaching, rappelling, and weapons skills.Beginning around late 1998, he put that military training to work against fast-food restaurants, primarily targeting McDonald’s locations across California and several other states.

His routine was clockwork: he climbed up on roofs, used cordless drills and saws to cut neat access holes in roofing tar and plywood, slipped inside under cover of dark, and waited patiently (often hiding inside customer restrooms) for the morning prep crew to arrive.Brandishing a firearm, he rounded up the terrified staff, forced them into the walk-in freezer, and looted the safe.What made him famous was his bizarre gentility: he spoke in a calm, polite voice, rarely resorted to violence, and famously made sure employees put on their winter coats before shutting them in the walk-in box so they would not freeze. Over two years, he pulled off an estimated 40 to 60 robberies before North Carolina police finally nabbed him in 2000, slapping him with a 45-year prison sentence.

The Ingenious Prison Break

Incarcerated at Brown Creek Correctional Institution in Polkton, North Carolina, Manchester was put to work in the facility’s metal fabrication shop.Spending months studying delivery truck traffic, he constructed a custom plywood platform, spray-painted it flat black, and rigged cardboard covers.On June 15, 2004, on a rainy day meant to throw off guard dogs, he fastened his rig under the chassis of an outgoing delivery truck and rode out right beneath the prison guards’ noses, becoming the first person to ever break out of that state facility.

Living at Toys “R” Us and Circuit City

After hitchhiking into Charlotte, North Carolina, Manchester needed shelter, water, and food.Having spent plenty of time shopping with his kids before his arrest, he decided a big-box store was the safest bet, figuring law enforcement would never suspect an escaped felon was hiding out in a play palace.

He broke into a massive Toys “R” Us off Independence Boulevard and lived inside undetected for roughly six months:

• The Living Quarters: He initially carved out a secret room tucked high behind bicycle display racks in the warehouse. When he found a crawlspace leading into an abandoned, adjoining Circuit City building next door, he built a 4-by-10-foot apartment under a stairwell, complete with painted sheetrock walls, posters, a small toy basketball hoop, an exercise setup, and a DVD player where he watched movies.
• Nighttime Antics: After employees locked up and the lights went down, Manchester had the run of the place. He subsisted on baby food jars, snacks, and candy from the checkout aisles. He worked out on the store roof, listened to a Discman, rode motorized Power Wheels and store bicycles down empty aisles, and even secretly rigged baby monitors to eavesdrop on the store managers’ offices and monitor their employee schedules.

The Church Romance and the Fall

During the day, Manchester left his attic hideout dressed in clean street clothes to blend into suburban life. He attended the local church, using the alias “John,” where he met and fell in love with Leigh Wainscott, a churchgoer and single mother who worked at the store. He charmed Leigh and the local congregation by presenting himself as a quiet, devout gentleman. He frequently showered Leigh’s children with toys, donated stolen merchandise to local charity toy drives, and even bought her a car using his criminal cash stash.

His ambition eventually caught up to him. Planning to rob the Toys “R” Us on the morning after Christmas (December 26, 2004) to finance a permanent getaway, things went sideways when two alerted employees managed to slip out a side door to call 911. Police searched the building and discovered his secret bicycle-shelf hideout and the connecting passage to the Circuit City bunker.

Though Manchester temporarily dodged that initial perimeter search, detectives processed his hidden lair and pulled his fingerprints and DNA from discarded dental floss and toothpicks he left behind. Within days, Charlotte police tracked his connections back to Wainscott’s church circle. Law enforcement surrounded and ambushed him when he attempted to visit Wainscott, putting an abrupt end to one of the most surreal fugitive hideouts in American history and sending him back behind bars with decades added to his original sentence.

Martin Scorsese’s bloated historical punch fest Gangs of New York is finally limping out onto home screens and streaming gadgets everywhere. Set in 1862 during the chaotic Civil War draft riots, the story follows an orphaned immigrant kid hellbent on slicing up the local butcher who gutted his daddy in the snow fifteen years earlier. The whole shebang promises a brutal look at how the Big Apple was actually built, mostly by people screaming, throwing rocks, and hitting each other with rusty hatchets.

Grab your remote, put your feet up, and prepare to sit through nearly three hours of mud, grime, fake accents, and grown men prancing around in tall stovepipe hats. If you like seeing the boyish heartthrob from Titanic get beaten into a bloody lump of mashed potatoes, you might actually get your rental money’s worth out of this expensive brawl.

Review by Ben Dover

Look, I had to drag myself through two hours and forty-seven minutes of this thing on my television screen, and my bad knee is still barking from sitting in the recliner that long. I like a good fistfight as much as the next guy. Back in my day, we solved problems behind the gym in about three minutes, not across three decades of operatic screaming. Marty Scorsese spent over thirty years daydreaming about this movie, and what does he give us? A mud pit populated by teenagers who need haircuts and old guys who need anger management.

Let us start with Daniel Day-Lewis playing Bill the Butcher. The man steals every single scrap of scenery, chops it with a cleaver, and swallows it whole. He struts around in red striped pants with a glass eye, tapping his knife on his false eyeball, sounding like a psychotic cartoon character. Honestly, he is terrific. The problem is that every time he is not on the screen, you are stuck watching Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz trying to act tough. Leo looks like he is about fourteen years old playing dress-up in his grandfather’s dirty clothes, and Diaz sounds like she learned her Irish brogue five minutes before the camera rolled while drinking a shamrock shake.

The pacing is an absolute disaster. The movie opens with an epic brawl that looks like a high school heavy metal concert in a cave, and then it drags on forever with boring political schemes and teenage romantic nonsense. These kids today with their short attention spans will never make it past the first forty minutes. They will be looking down at their little glowing phones playing video games before the first bucket of pig blood even dries. You get long scenes where characters whisper about loyalty in shadowy parlors, interrupted by random knife-throwing acts at a circus show. Pick a lane, Marty!

Then comes the grand finale, where the big grudge match finally happens, except the United States Navy starts blasting cannonballs into the neighborhood from the harbor. You wait almost three hours for a showdown, and half the cast gets wiped out by artillery smoke and falling bricks before they can even trade punches. It completely ruins the fight!

It is not an unwatchable movie because Day-Lewis puts on a masterclass in crazy, but it is way too long, messy, and self-indulgent.

Cast and Characters

• Daniel Day-Lewis (William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting): The only reason to watch this circus. He trained with actual butchers and stays terrifying the whole time.
• Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon): He tries hard, but he still looks like the fresh-faced kid from the teen magazines.
• Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane): A pickpocket who dresses like a Victorian doll. Her accent drifts across three different oceans depending on the scene.
• Jim Broadbent (Boss Tweed): Corrupt, fat, greedy politician. The only completely believable character because politicians have not changed a lick in two hundred years.
• John C. Reilly (Happy Jack Mulraney): Plays a dirty cop who switched sides. Nice mustache, bad life choices.
• Liam Neeson (“Priest” Vallon): Dies in the first ten minutes. Smartest man in the cast because he got his paycheck and went home early.

Special Effects and Music

The special effects are mostly practical buckets of blood, severed ears, and a massive full-scale city set they built over in Italy. The street sets actually look fantastic, full of filth and real pig carcasses. When they do bring in digital computer junk, like that fake smoke and a CGI elephant running through a fire, it looks pretty goofy.

As for the music, it is all over the place. One minute you get traditional Irish fiddles, the next minute you hear weird tribal drums, and then suddenly you get a screeching pop song from U2 during the end credits. It makes no sense, but at least the loud thumping woke me up whenever the plot started to drag.

Rating

2.5 out of 5 Stars (Two stars for Daniel Day-Lewis, half a star for the set builders, and zero stars for the runtime).

Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

The whole mess kicks off in 1846 in lower Manhattan’s notorious Five Points slum. An Irish Catholic gang called the Dead Rabbits, led by “Priest” Vallon, clashes in a snowy street war against the Native American Protestant gang led by Bill “The Butcher” Cutting. Bill guts Priest Vallon right in front of Vallon’s young son, Amsterdam. Bill wins the turf war, outlaws the Dead Rabbits, and sends the boy away to an orphanage on Hellgate Island.

Sixteen years roll by. Amsterdam grows up into Leonardo DiCaprio and returns to the Five Points in 1862 looking for revenge. He tosses his Bible into the river, reunites with his old buddy Johnny Sirocco, and infiltrates Bill the Butcher’s inner circle. Bill does not recognize the kid and actually takes him under his wing as a surrogate son and bodyguard. Meanwhile, Amsterdam falls in love with Jenny Everdeane, a clever pickpocket and grifter who used to be Bill’s lover.

Amsterdam plans to murder Bill publicly during the annual celebration honoring Priest Vallon’s defeat, believing a king must be slain in front of his court. However, Johnny gets jealous over Jenny, betrays Amsterdam, and snitches to Bill. At the banquet, Bill calls Amsterdam out during a knife-throwing show. Amsterdam hurls a blade at Bill, but Bill deflects it and counters by pinning Amsterdam to the floor. Instead of killing him, Bill carves Amsterdam’s cheek with a hot blade, beats his face to pulp, and lets him live in disgrace.

Jenny nurses Amsterdam back to health in an underground church. Amsterdam recovers, rallies the Irish immigrant population, hangs a dead rabbit on a lamppost to declare war, and gets the old gang back together. They align with Tammany Hall leader Boss Tweed to back an Irish candidate, Monk McGinn, for sheriff. Monk wins the election by a landslide, so Bill simply murders him in broad daylight with a cleaver on the street.

Amsterdam challenges Bill to a massive, bare-knuckle gang war in Paradise Square. On the day of the fight, the city erupts into the historic Civil War draft riots. Federal troops invade the streets, and naval gunboats start firing heavy shells directly into the Five Points to suppress the rioters. The bombardment decimates the battlefield with dust and shrapnel before the gangs can even finish their clash. Amidst the rubble, a piece of flying artillery shrapnel mortally wounds Bill. Amsterdam stabs the dying butcher, Jenny and Amsterdam bury Bill next to Priest Vallon on a Brooklyn hill overlooking Manhattan, and the two head west while the modern New York skyline gradually grows over their forgotten graves.

5 Famous Quotes

1. “I don’t see no Americans. I see trespassers, Irish harps. Do a job for a nickel what a nigger does for a dime and what a white man used to get a quarter for.”
2. “When you kill a king, you don’t stab him in the dark. You kill him where the entire court can watch him die.”
3. “The ballots don’t make the results, the counters make the results. The counters. Keep counting.”
4. “You see this knife? I’m gonna teach you to speak English with this fucking knife.”
5. “I killed the last honorable man fifteen years ago.”

5 Interesting Notes and Facts

1. Decades on the shelf:Martin Scorsese first read Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York in 1970 and spent roughly 32 years trying to gather the money and star power to actually get it made.
2. Built entirely in Rome:Rather than shooting on real New York streets that no longer exist, production designer Dante Ferretti built a full-scale mile-long set of the 1860s Five Points at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, complete with functional saloons and harbor docks.
3. Butcher school: Daniel Day-Lewis took his role so seriously that he apprenticed under master butchers in Queens and London to learn how to carve meat and flip cleavers like an authentic Victorian butcher.
4. The Blues Brothers almost starred:During early development in the late 1970s, Scorsese’s dream casting for the two lead roles was Dan Aykroyd as Amsterdam and John Belushi as Bill the Butcher.
5. George Lucas and the fake elephant:When the crew could not find a live circus elephant in Italy on short notice, visiting friend George Lucas advised them on how to film the empty space so a digital elephant could be edited in later.

Photos

Trailer

Notes

• A movie so long, the kids who started watching it in theaters are collecting Social Security now!
• Daniel Day-Lewis brings a cleaver to a movie where the script brought a butter knife.

The ultimate nineties comedy for anyone who wishes they could attend their reunion with a silencer.

High school reunions are widely considered by civilized people to be a form of cruel and unusual punishment. In the 1997 dark comedy Grosse Pointe Blank, director George Armitage takes that universal social dread and arms it with a silencer and an assault rifle. The film centers on Martin Blank, an independent contract killer who is suffering from severe job burnout and a late-onset moral crisis. When a lucrative assignment lines up with his ten-year class reunion in his affluent childhood hometown near Detroit, Martin decides to go home to face his past and track down the high school sweetheart he stood up on prom night.

Co-written by its leading man, John Cusack, alongside Tom Jankiewicz, D.V. DeVincentis, and Steve Pink, the movie balances cynical nineties workplace angst with bloody shootouts and an aggressive soundtrack. The ensemble features Minnie Driver, Dan Aykroyd, Alan Arkin, and Joan Cusack. By dropping international hitmen and federal agents directly into the middle of suburban nostalgia, Grosse Pointe Blank delivers a sharp, offbeat comedy about growing up, selling out, and trying not to get blown up by your former peers.

Review by Ben Dover

I dragged my aching back onto the couch after a miserable day dealing with customer service people who sound twelve years old and do not understand plain English. Every time I ask a simple question, some kid on the phone tells me to download an app or check their social media page. I do not want to download an app. I want you to do your job so I can sit in my chair, eat a sandwich in peace, and watch a movie where grown men actually know how to wear a suit without showing six inches of ankle.

Watching John Cusack run around as a depressed hitman who is terrified of seeing his old classmates hits uncomfortably close to home. The entire concept of a high school reunion is completely ridiculous anyway. Nobody actually cares how your insurance business is doing, Dave. Nobody wants to look at pictures of your kids or hear about your timeshare in Florida. The fact that an international assassin would rather dodge bullets in a war zone than make small talk with the kid who ate paste in eighth grade is the most honest thing put on film in forty years. Cusack plays it with that dead-eyed, exhausted look of a guy who just realized the last decade of his life was a total waste.

Dan Aykroyd steals half the movie by playing an unhinged, sweaty rival killer named Grocer who wants to unionize the hitman racket. Aykroyd is screaming, sweating through his shirts, and firing automatic weapons like a maniac, which is exactly what I want to see. Then you have Alan Arkin as the psychiatrist who is clearly wishing he had chosen any other career path. Arkin looks like he wants to jump out the window every single time Cusack sits on his couch, and his dry delivery is perfection. Minnie Driver does a fine job as the radio DJ ex-girlfriend, Debi, though why she is willing to give this guy five minutes after he vanished off the face of the earth for ten years is a mystery to me. Today they have fancy internet terms for that, but when I was growing up we just called a guy like that a complete scumbag.

The movie does run into some slow patches right around the middle where Martin starts moping around town like a high school poet. You take bags of cash to put people in holes, Martin. You are not an artist with deep feelings; you are a criminal who needs to get his act together. We do not need twenty minutes of walking through empty hallways and crying about your wasted youth. Cut the whining, stop boring your poor therapist, and get back to the part where people are throwing each other through grocery store display cases.

Even with the self-indulgent second-act drag, the writing is leagues ahead of the mindless superhero slop that the studios dump out today. It makes fun of the eighties without turning into a lazy nostalgia commercial, the jokes actually have bite, and the gunfights look like they were filmed by people who actually understand how gravity works. It is funny, cynical, and it does not insult my intelligence.

Cast and Characters

• John Cusack as Martin Q. Blank: An emotionally numb, sharply dressed freelance assassin having a midlife crisis who reluctantly attends his ten-year high school reunion.
• Minnie Driver as Debi Newberry: Martin’s former high school sweetheart who works as a local DJ and is rightfully furious that he vanished without a word on prom night.
• Dan Aykroyd as Grocer: A loud, relentless rival assassin trying to force Martin into joining an organized syndicate of contract killers.
• Alan Arkin as Dr. Oatman: Martin’s deeply stressed-out psychiatrist who only continues treating him because he is terrified of being murdered.
• Joan Cusack as Marcella: Martin’s fiercely capable assistant who manages his travel schedules, weapon orders, and reunion paperwork with military efficiency.
• Jeremy Piven as Paul Spericki: Martin’s hyperactive high school buddy who works as a local real estate agent and refuses to admit he hates his life.
• Hank Azaria and K. Todd Freeman as Steven Lardner and Felix McCullers: Two bumbling federal agents tasked with keeping surveillance on Martin’s suburban chaos.

Special Effects

There are no cheap cartoon computer effects here to give you a migraine. The stunts and visual gags are handled with real practical stunt work, real prop firearms, and actual glass breaking on real floors. The hand-to-hand fight in the school hallway between Cusack and kickboxing champion Benny Urquidez is tight, rough, and looks genuinely painful. When a building or a convenience store blows up, you get actual fire and smoke instead of a computer graphic generated by someone who has never been outside.

Music

The entire soundtrack was overseen by Joe Strummer of The Clash, so the whole film is loaded with classic punk, new wave, and ska. You hear tracks from The Clash, English Beat, Violent Femmes, David Bowie, and Specials. It has real instruments played by real musicians, which makes a nice change from the electronic garbage kids listen to through their little ear pods these days.

Rating

4.5 out of 5 Stars “A sharp movie with real stunts and no cartoon effects, exactly the way Ben Dover likes it.”

A sharp, mean-spirited dark comedy with plenty of laughs and good action, even if the main character spends a little too much time whining about his sensitive feelings.

Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

Martin Blank is a freelance assassin operating out of an office in California with his loyal assistant, Marcella. Following a blown assignment in the Basque Country caused by an erratic rival named Felix McCullers, Martin receives a new contract targeting an office equipment executive located in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Because his high school class is holding its ten-year reunion in Grosse Pointe that same weekend, Marcella and Martin’s reluctant psychiatrist, Dr. Oatman, convince him to take the job and attend the event to work through his psychological issues.

Upon arriving in his hometown, Martin discovers that his old family home was demolished to make room for a convenience store. He visits his institutionalized mother and reconnects with his high school friend Paul, who has become an overcaffeinated real estate salesman. Martin tracks down his old high school girlfriend, Debi Newberry, who works as a radio DJ. Debi is furious at him for abandoning her on prom night ten years earlier, but she agrees to let him take her out so she can demand an explanation.

At the same time, rival hitman Grocer tries to intimidate Martin into joining a new hitman labor union. When Martin repeatedly refuses, Grocer tips off federal agents Steven Lardner and Felix McCullers and recruits a vengeful Basque assassin named Gianni McCullers to track Martin down.

Martin brings Debi to their ten-year reunion at the high school. Between awkward conversations with former classmates bragging about their corporate jobs, Martin is ambushed in a hallway by Gianni McCullers. Martin kills him with a pen in self-defense and stuffs the body into the school furnace with the help of a drunken former classmate. However, Debi accidentally discovers Martin’s weapons and his dossier, realizing what he does for a living, and runs away in terror.

Martin follows Debi to her father’s house, only to realize that her father, Bob Newberry, is the client target he was originally sent to kill for agreeing to testify against a corrupt corporation. Grocer, his henchmen, and the federal agents assault the house simultaneously. Martin takes out the attacking hitmen, protects Bob, and kills Grocer by smashing a television set over his head. Martin announces his immediate retirement from the assassination business, reconciles with Debi after proving his loyalty, and leaves town with her to start over.

5 Famous Quotes

1. Grocer: “No meetings. You know why? Because I’m talking to you right now, and I don’t see no meetings.”
2. Martin Blank: “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How have you been?”
3. Dr. Oatman: “Don’t kill anybody for a few days. See what it feels like.”
4. Debi Newberry: “You’re a psycho.”
   Martin Blank: “No, a psychopath kills for fun. I kill for money.”
5. Martin Blank: “I’m a pet psychologist. No, I’m a professional killer.”

5 Interesting Facts

1. Kickboxing Legend: The assassin who fights Martin in the high school hallway is played by Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, who was John Cusack’s actual real-life kickboxing trainer for more than twenty years.
2. Cusack Family Project: John Cusack’s real-life sister, Joan Cusack, plays his assistant Marcella, while his other siblings Ann and Bill also make small appearances throughout the film.
3. Punk Rock Heritage: Joe Strummer, the legendary lead singer of The Clash, composed the film’s original score in addition to putting together the licensed punk and ska soundtrack.
4. California for Michigan: Although the entire movie is set around Grosse Pointe, Michigan, nearly the entire production was shot in the California towns of Monrovia and Pasadena to save on production costs.
5. Real-Life Schoolmates: Co-writers John Cusack, Steve Pink, and D.V. DeVincentis all went to high school together at Evanston Township High School in Illinois and used their own fears of attending high school reunions to write the movie.

Photos

Trailer

Directed by James Mangold, this psychological whodunit operates on a classic Agatha Christie locked-room setup with a gritty early-2000s slasher makeover. While the isolated victims scramble to pinpoint the killer among them, a parallel storyline unfolds in a courtroom where a condemned killer awaits a midnight sanity hearing. It promises plenty of rain, paranoia, and a web of bizarre coincidences that will keep viewers guessing right until the final reveal.

Review by Ben Dover

“Come for the motel massacre, stay for the ending that will make you throw your remote across the room.” – Ben

I had to dig through three different streaming apps on my television just to find this thing, and let me tell you, modern streaming menus were clearly designed by teenagers with attention spans of five seconds. Half an hour of scrolling past twenty different superhero sequels just to watch a movie from 2003 where it rains for an hour and a half straight. I am sixty years old, my joints ache when the humidity goes up five percent, and watching John Cusack stand in ankle-deep mud for ninety minutes almost gave me pneumonia through the screen.

The story is your standard setup. Ten miserable people get stuck at a motel in the middle of nowhere during a freak storm, and somebody starts wiping them out. You have the limousine driver, the spoiled washed-up actress, the cop hauling a dangerous prisoner, a nervous newlywed couple, a call girl trying to start an orange grove, and a bickering family. It is basically Ten Little Indians, except everyone has cell phones the size of bricks that naturally have zero signal. If kids today had to live without cell service for ten minutes like these people, they would drop dead on the spot.

Now, I will give credit where credit is due. For the first hour, this thing actually hooked me. Mangold knows how to build suspense without throwing cheap jump scares at my face every thirty seconds like the garbage they put in theaters today. The pacing moves along nicely, the kills are nasty and unexpected, and John Cusack brings that trademark grumpy competence that makes him fun to watch when he is not brooding in a trench coat.

Then the big twist hits, and good grief, did somebody lose their mind in the writer room. Without spoiling it too much in this section, the movie decides to pull the rug out from under you so hard that the entire murder mystery you spent an hour caring about essentially stops mattering. It thinks it is so clever, but all it really did was make me realize I was emotionally invested in an imaginary game of chess. I like a good mystery where you can actually piece together the clues, not one where the screenwriter just flips the table and shouts gotcha.

Still, it is leagues better than the computer-generated nonsense coming out nowadays. It has actual tension, real practical gore, and actors who look like real human beings instead of filtered social media models. If you can stomach a ridiculous third-act gimmick that will make you roll your eyes straight into the back of your skull, it is a fun enough Friday night watch from your recliner.

Cast

• John Cusack (Ed Dakin): A former cop turned private limousine driver who ends up taking charge when bodies start piling up. Cusack does what he always does: looks drenched, talks fast, and plays a stressed-out professional.
• Ray Liotta (Rhodes): A tense, aggressive corrections officer transporting a dangerous convict. Liotta brings his usual twitchy intensity, which immediately makes you suspicious of every single thing he does.
• Amanda Peet (Paris Nevada): A Las Vegas escort on her way to Florida to buy an orange grove and turn her life around. She ends up being the emotional anchor of the whole group.
• John Hawkes (Larry Washington): The nervous, sketchy motel night manager who clearly has plenty of things to hide, mostly regarding petty theft and general weirdness.
• Alfred Molina (Dr. Malick): The defense psychiatrist trying to prove that a condemned serial killer named Malcolm Rivers is legally insane before he gets executed at midnight.
• Pruitt Taylor Vince (Malcolm Rivers): The convict whose midnight sanity hearing frames the entire murder mystery.
• Rebecca De Mornay (Caroline Suzanne): An arrogant, faded Hollywood diva stranded in the limo, complaining about everything until she abruptly stops complaining forever.
• John C. McGinley (George York): A frantic family man whose wife gets hit by the limousine at the start of the night.
• Clea DuVall and William Lee Scott (Ginny and Lou Ismael): The bickering newlywed couple who cannot go two minutes without screaming at each other.
• Jake Busey (Robert Maine): The wild-eyed, handcuffed convict in transit.

Special Effects and Music

The special effects are mostly old-school practical makeup and atmospheric staging, which is a massive relief compared to the cartoon CGI that infests modern movies. The gore is punchy, blunt, and looks painful, especially when people are getting shoved into laundry dryers or having baseball bats rammed down their throats. The rain and storm effects do get a little overbearing, to the point where you wonder how the motel roof is not collapsing under five million gallons of water, but it sets a solid mood.

The musical score by Alan Silvestri does its job without showing off. It uses heavy strings and unsettling brass cues to spike the tension whenever someone wanders into a dark room alone, which happens about forty times because movie characters never learn basic survival instincts.

Rating

★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5 Stars)

A better movie BEFORE the twist.

Plot Breakdown and Synopsis

The film opens with a midnight sanity hearing for a death row inmate named Malcolm Rivers, who is scheduled for execution in less than twenty-four hours. His psychiatrist, Dr. Malick, and his defense attorney have discovered misplaced psychiatric journals demonstrating that Malcolm suffers from severe dissociative identity disorder, hoping to stay the execution on grounds of legal insanity.

Simultaneously, out in the Nevada desert, a severe storm forces multiple travelers to take refuge at an isolated roadside motel managed by a nervous man named Larry. The guests include Ed, an ex-cop driving a washed-up actress named Caroline; a family dealing with an injured mother struck by Ed’s car; a newlywed couple named Lou and Ginny; an escort named Paris heading to Florida; and an officer named Rhodes transporting an escaped convict named Maine.

Shortly after arriving, Caroline is decapitated in the motel laundromat, and the killer leaves behind the Room 10 key with her head. Chaos erupts as the survivors suspect Maine, the prisoner, who soon manages to escape his restraints. However, Maine is quickly found dead with a baseball bat shoved down his throat, accompanied by the Room 9 key. One by one, the guests are murdered in descending order of room keys.

While investigating, Ed discovers a series of bizarre patterns: all ten stranded guests share the exact same birthday, May 10th, and every single one of their names is derived from a U.S. state or state capital.

The story then reveals its massive twist: the motel murders are not occurring in the physical world at all. They are happening entirely inside the fractured psyche of Malcolm Rivers. Under Dr. Malick’s intensive psychiatric treatment, Malcolm’s mind is executing an internal exercise to eliminate his various split personalities so that only his core, non-violent identity remains.

As the survivors dwindle inside his mind, Ed discovers that Rhodes is actually an escaped convict who killed the real transport officer and stole his uniform. Ed sacrifices his own mental avatar to gun down Rhodes, believing he has destroyed the murderous persona and left only the peaceful Paris alive to cultivate her Florida orange grove.

Back in reality, the judge accepts the insanity defense and remands Malcolm to a psychiatric institution. However, during the transport ride, Malcolm retreats back into his internal mindscape. Paris arrives at her new orange grove, only to find the Room 1 key buried in the dirt. Timmy, the young boy from the stranded family who faked his death earlier in the storm, reveals himself as the true homicidal personality. He kills Paris inside the mindscape, while the real Malcolm brutally strangles Dr. Malick and the transport van driver in the physical world.

5 Quotes

“As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

“Who says I want to go to heaven?”

“You know, you’re not the only one who can change.”

“There is no orange grove!”

“When I was a kid, my mother told me that character is what you do when no one is looking.”

5 Interesting Facts

• The opening poem recited throughout the film is based on the 1899 poem “Antigonish” by Hughes Mearns, which was inspired by reports of a ghost roaming a stairway in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
• Every single character stranded at the motel is named after a U.S. state or state capital: Ed Dakin (South/North Dakota), Rhodes (Rhode Island), Paris (Paris, Texas), Caroline (North/South Carolina), Larry (Washington), George York (New York), Ginny (Virginia), Lou (Louisiana), Maine (Maine), and Suzanne (Susanne/Montana).
• Director James Mangold and his crew used massive overhead water rigs that dumped over two thousand gallons of water per minute to simulate the torrential Nevada storm on set.
• Pruitt Taylor Vince, who plays Malcolm Rivers, has an involuntary eye condition called nystagmus, which causes his eyes to dart rapidly side to side, a trait that the filmmakers used to heighten his character’s psychological instability… Freaks me out every time I see him. – Ben
• The entire motel was built specifically for the production on a soundstage and a movie ranch in Santa Clarita, California, designed to give the director total control over the artificial storm environment.

Photos

Trailer