IS IT REALLY THAT BAD? #1: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

There are a number of reasons to give a film a bad review. [1] It is genuinely terrible and the public need to be warned. [2] End of list. Anything else is just part of your standup routine, or a look-at-me thinkpiece designed for clicks and retweets: Ten Things Wrong With Die Hard, Why Jaws Isn't The Masterpiece You Think It Is, Everyone Who Likes Titanic Is A Hopeless Idiot And Should Be Horsewhipped. Somewhere a line has been crossed between film reviewing and sheer contrariness: somewhere it stopped being about the film and started being about the reviewer's follower count.

Certainly there is great fun to be had when trained and experienced professional critics are gifted a Cats or a Battlefield Earth, and we mere mortals are in turn gifted five hundred words of finely crafted invective. And the democratisation of the internet has meant that any blowharding halfwit with a blogger account and a spellchecker can join in the frenzy and get a few solid kicks in as well. (Exhibit A: you're looking at it.) But sometimes there's more interest in Ten Great Things About Hudson Hawk or Why Jaws 2 Is Actually Better Than You Think It Is. Sometimes it's better to re-evaluate the old failures rather than piss on the old classics, to find something good about a much-derided film rather than something bad about a much-loved one.

So let's mount some kind of Case For The Defence. Let's see if some of those disasters were actually that terrible.

#1: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

I saw this in Screen One at the Cannon Cinema in Portsmouth sometime in April 1991. Back then it wasn't unusual for the UK to get films several months after their US release, so we were already aware that it had not been well received by critics or audiences. I hadn't read the book - I still haven't and it's extremely unlikely I ever will - so I was at least able to go into it with a relatively open mind, judging it as a film on its own terms and not comparing it to the source material. Fidelity to the original text is, for me, irrelevant: if you want the book, read the book. The film of Moonraker goes from California to Venice to Rio to outer space; Ian Fleming's novel never leaves the South Coast of England and retains precisely one character name outside of the regulars. If Moonraker has faults (and it absolutely does), straying from the book isn't one of them.

I remember enjoying the film enough at the time: it was okay, though probably not much more than that. I haven't revisited it since, until the other night. And.... that's where the Case For The Defence falls down. Because, in answer to the question Is It Really That Bad?, the answer is pretty much Yes. It's not a good film, it isn't funny (which is a major problem with comedy), and too many of the characters are grotesques, caricatures and straight up monsters. Specifically this refers to the two main female characters, in whom it is utterly implausible that our supposed hero (Tom Hanks) would show the slightest sliver of interest: Kim Cattrall as his frankly horrible wife and Melanie Griffith as his frankly horrible mistress. Others are overdone: F Murray Abraham's mayor, John Hancock's reverend. Meanwhile our supposed hero is underdone: he's supposed to be one of those Wall Street "Masters Of The Universe" types trading multi-million dollar stocks and bonds and cheating on his wife... but they need us to feel a measure of engagement with him, so it's that nice Tom Hanks. Which is fine, because everybody likes Tom Hanks, but this doesn't feel like a character who should be soft and cuddly: he should be a bastard and a scumbag.

Obviously I knew this was a Brian De Palma film, and I knew it was not in his thriller mode which I loved so much: Dressed To Kill, Blow Out, Body Double. But this isn't a glossy erotic thriller: this is a social satire and a black comedy, which require a completely different eye. This and the gangster knockabout Wise Guys are the only overt comedies in the BDP filmography (apart from, supposedly, the early weird ones like Greetings); possibly the director was as miscast as some of the actors?

So what's to like? Well, there are still a few touches of premium De Palma in there: those gorgeous technical signatures such as split diopter shots and unnecessarily long takes. There's a pleasantly jaunty theme by Dave Grusin, even if the rest of the score isn't that memorable (I listened to the soundtrack album again and outside of the Main and End Titles there's really not much in there). And it's always good to see reliables like Morgan Freeman, Kevin Dunn, Donald Moffatt. Actually, if you ignore the fact that the character in the novel is English rather than American, Bruce Willis is particularly enjoyable, very much in flip Moonlighting mode rather than Die Hard. Sadly, he's also narrating and frankly it sounds like he's reading straight from the book.

Overall, though, the verdict has to be Yes, It Really Is That Bad. The rewatch the other night - the first since its release 35 years ago - actually felt worse than it did back at the Cannon Portsmouth. It's a pity: there are a handful of positives, but they're vastly outweighed.