I'm completely stunned by the amount of praise people seem to be lavishing on this turkey. It's awful. It makes little sense. And worst of all, it's not even a 'fun-derivative' movie, a la the John Sayles-type of exploitation films of the late '70's, early '80's.
Ex-low life (now nicknamed "Jimmy the Saint") Andy Garcia plans 'one final job' for mobster Christopher Walken. For reasons that make absolutely no sense, he gets a bunch of idiotic misfits to help him. These sub-criminals are put together by the screenwriter for the sole purpose of having the viewer watch people yell and scream at each other. For instance, the black guy doesn't want to work with Treat Williams because he heard that Treat was a 'fecal eater' (a fact that doesn't exactly advance the plot) in prison. So for more minutes than we need, we see yelling and shouting about this.
The job gets botched because...if it didn't, there would be no movie. Walken tells Garcia that his crew will now be -- get this -- "buckwheats." What are 'buckwheats' you may ask? Good question. As narrator Jack Warden (who inexplicably spends the entire movie telling us poor viewers what's going on from inside the malt shop Garcia is prone to visit)explains it, 'buckwheats' means that you will die in a most painful way. Ooooh! The rest of the film deals with Garcia trying to get his brain-dead crew to leave town. He offers them plane tickets to exotic locations. No one accepts these tickets because...well, if they did, the filmmakers wouldn't be able to show us the various ways these people get tortured and killed by assassain Steve (have they made a movie without me yet?) Buscemi.
Lotsa wannabe hip dialogue is peppered throughout this movie in an obvious attempt to ape Tarantino. The only problem is, the dialogue doesn't make a lot of sense without Jack Warden to explain it all. A complete waste of time.
On scale of 1 to 10, give this one a 1...and that's being generous.
Ex-low life (now nicknamed "Jimmy the Saint") Andy Garcia plans 'one final job' for mobster Christopher Walken. For reasons that make absolutely no sense, he gets a bunch of idiotic misfits to help him. These sub-criminals are put together by the screenwriter for the sole purpose of having the viewer watch people yell and scream at each other. For instance, the black guy doesn't want to work with Treat Williams because he heard that Treat was a 'fecal eater' (a fact that doesn't exactly advance the plot) in prison. So for more minutes than we need, we see yelling and shouting about this.
The job gets botched because...if it didn't, there would be no movie. Walken tells Garcia that his crew will now be -- get this -- "buckwheats." What are 'buckwheats' you may ask? Good question. As narrator Jack Warden (who inexplicably spends the entire movie telling us poor viewers what's going on from inside the malt shop Garcia is prone to visit)explains it, 'buckwheats' means that you will die in a most painful way. Ooooh! The rest of the film deals with Garcia trying to get his brain-dead crew to leave town. He offers them plane tickets to exotic locations. No one accepts these tickets because...well, if they did, the filmmakers wouldn't be able to show us the various ways these people get tortured and killed by assassain Steve (have they made a movie without me yet?) Buscemi.
Lotsa wannabe hip dialogue is peppered throughout this movie in an obvious attempt to ape Tarantino. The only problem is, the dialogue doesn't make a lot of sense without Jack Warden to explain it all. A complete waste of time.
On scale of 1 to 10, give this one a 1...and that's being generous.