Dreary & finally pointless movie: if Clint Eastwood had made The Deer Hunter. Childhood pals, long estranged, are brought together when one of the pal's daughters is murdered.
Stars got the Boston accents down, although Tim Robbins's reticent character is a variation on his old Andy Dufresne persona, but in the end the murder has nothing to do with the three pals & none of the main characters changes (well, yeah, except for Robbins). The failure here: murder as plot device to delve into the past of the pals; pals, tho, peripheral to murder. I mean, it's not like Jimmy's daughter was killed to punish him!
Robbins et al. are enjoyable to watch, & I'm sure the effort here was sincere, but the movie went on way too long after the case was solved, & it looks as if creating a "work of art" took precedence over making a coherent movie, which along with a score by Eastwood was a 3d-rate film version of Albinoni's Adagio, sometimes called the most depressing piece of music ever.
Stars got the Boston accents down, although Tim Robbins's reticent character is a variation on his old Andy Dufresne persona, but in the end the murder has nothing to do with the three pals & none of the main characters changes (well, yeah, except for Robbins). The failure here: murder as plot device to delve into the past of the pals; pals, tho, peripheral to murder. I mean, it's not like Jimmy's daughter was killed to punish him!
Robbins et al. are enjoyable to watch, & I'm sure the effort here was sincere, but the movie went on way too long after the case was solved, & it looks as if creating a "work of art" took precedence over making a coherent movie, which along with a score by Eastwood was a 3d-rate film version of Albinoni's Adagio, sometimes called the most depressing piece of music ever.