Reviews

It's hard to describe how good this movie is without sounding sycophantic but it really is that good. This film is based on the "true" story of when the notorious reporter Hunter S. Thompson and his then attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta went to Las Vegas to cover a bike race for rolling stone magazine but instead spent the entire trip going out of their minds on various illegal and legal chemicals. This may sound like a one trick pony for stoners and 60's throwbacks but I am neither and I thoroughly enjoyed this film. Very few films based on books manage to tell the story or capture the spirit of the original but F&L certainly manages both. The story sticks closely enough to the book without alienating the books fan base but also trims out the right areas so that the film doesn't become overly long and uninteresting.

The film is still fairly long, compared with most popcorn fare, at around 2hrs and does sag a little in places but the pace quickly picks up again. The performances are absolutely spot on with Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro virtually becoming their characters. Both are heavily disguised under make-up but their acting ability shines through. On first viewing I wasn't that impressed, it was a good film but not a great film, but after a second viewing I fell in love with it. You notice things and pick up on gags the second time around that you missed the first time. You immerse yourself in their world so much that you feel like you were there with them on the "trip" in both senses of the word. I have shown this film to most of my friends and they also have become hooked after viewing the film twice, it's such a shame that this great film works like this as I'm sure there are many people who are unwilling to give it the second chance it deserves. If you haven't seen this film I suggest you do and if you don't like it see it again. If you have seen this film and didn't like it, see it again.

I first saw this film when I was about 14-15 and I wasn't that impressed. I had already seen the sequel, "Fletch lives" and thought that "Fletch" was the much duller first offering. I now realize that this boredom I experienced was because this film had a much better story and wasn't purely a succession of different disguises and predictable mugging by Chevy Chase that I found funny as a child. I now fully appreciate "Fletch" as the better of the two. It has an interesting and original story that has the right amount of suspense and humor and manages to tie up all the loose ends nicely. Having recently read the book the film is based on I have to say I preferred the film, as I found it took the main themes and story of the book but made it far more fast-paced an entertaining.

While you can see the character of Fletch in the film is certainly 70% Chevy Chase, he even does his "Look at the wristwatch that isn't there" that he does in the caddyshack films, he still makes the character more believable than any of his other roles. Some of the humor is very dry and alot is clever word play and the observation that most of the time people aren't listening to what other people say. Some of it is very broad and slapstick but all these styles of humor are perfectly meshed into the very serious plot of murder, drug smuggling and adultery. The only negative comment is that there is an unnecessary car chase about half-way through that really doesn't need to be there but this is a minor blip in a great film.

The supporting characters do just that and are never overwhelmed by Chase and the film is very refreshing when compared with most comedies that usually forget about the story to make plenty of room for the jokes. "Fletch" gives the right amount of time to both. I was so impressed with the film and it's sequel that I have since read all the original Fletch books and am really looking forward to seeing the Kevin Smith adaptation of "Fletch Won". This is a really enjoyable film that should have been as popular as Beverly Hills cop in it's day but was overlooked for some reason. This is well worth watching just for the "Moon river" scene. Once you've seen the film you'll know exactly what I mean.

How else would he have managed to convince the world at large this is any good. The special effects were amazing but we expect that by now, the action scenes were good but once again they always are, the acting was so non-existent I don't think the actors could have been trying, The dialogue was sub-standard even for Lucas and the story was weak. Lucas clearly set out to impress the fans by including R2-D2 and C3PO in much bigger roles even though this throws up huge plot holes like why do none of the characters from the original trilogy remember encountering these droids who help them save the universe, it appears Lucas doesn't realize that you can't make a prequel unless it makes sense of the original in the same way you can't have a sequel that doesn't make sense of the film it follows on from. Why doesn't he get some proper writers like Laurence Kasdan in again and is he still trying to convince us that he always intended there to be 9 parts and had them planned out from the start which is quite frankly an obvious lie.

This movie is awful and Paul Anderson (Not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson, who is a much more talented director and even though I don't like his movies I at least appreciate that he knows how to tell a story)has accomplished a great feat by making this movie bad on so many different levels: the plot, the dialogue, the special effects, the acting, the characterization, the gratuitous nudity (while appreciated by the men in the audience was no way justified). If only one of these aspects had been at fault I could have looked past it but unfortunately nothing was handled well. Firstly in an age of digital effects like those seen in Lord of the rings and Spider-man audiences have come to expect good effects not Zombies created with a bit of green make-up and dogs covered in tinned spaghetti the one digital effect they did spend any money on looked like it was created on an etchasketch, I was more impressed with the graphics in the game than the film. I understand the budget was fairly low but even low-budget horror movies have still managed to produce genuinely scaring looking effects, one only has to watch "From Dusk 'til Dawn" or "The Evil Dead" to see that.

The plot's only good point was that it was an original piece of work with nothing I could see taken from the game apart from some of the names and monsters, but if you took away the dogs, the licker, the umbrella corporation and racoon city and called the virus the U-virus or something similar then nothing would remind you even slightly of the game, which can sometimes be a good thing if the writer can come up with an original story better than the one in the game, but he can't, it's predictable (you know who the bad guy is after the first 15 minutes) there is no suspense other than that created by the overly loud sound-track which accompanies ever scare so you can hear the "surprise" coming every time. In an age of self-knowing films like "Scream" it's hard to believe that it takes the characters the entire length of the film to realize their in trouble and I'm pretty sure the word Zombie isn't mentioned once. This may have been a conscious decision to avoid getting called a "typical zombie movie" but that is exactly what the film is so why try and disguise it, there are gaping plot holes that the dialogue tries to cover over but fails, such as how the virus goes from an airborne virus, which would presumably affect the squad, to a contact transmitted one even though the virus clearly needs to be injected into rabbits and it would surely make sense to stay as an airborne virus to reach as many hosts as possible or to engineer it so that it couldn't become airborne from a safety point of view not change from one to the other as it felt like it. The dialogue could have been written by a child it was that simple and very stupid there was no wit, which is a well established feature of this type of movie and of life in general, but none of the characters display this "laugh in the face of danger" attitude audiences have come to expect and enjoy. I have read the George Romero Script on the net (although there is no guarantee it was actually written by Romero) and whoever actually did write it isn't important as it is much better than the film, even in it's first draft stage. The numerous characters are all given enough dialogue to give you a 3-dimensional feel to them and all are dealt with in a fitting way, the story is close to the game but still entertaining and suspenseful, the creatures are well used and fit in to the story aptly and while it would have required a much bigger budget it would have saved me the 2hrs of boredom sitting through the filmed version gave. Maybe it is unfair to criticize the acting considering the material they had but nobody made the most of it and there was never any sense that they were real people but instead objects to be dispatched by various badly conceived monsters and awful special effects. I can only imagine all the actors involved pleading to be killed off. How Mila Jovovich gets away with showing so much flesh in her movies including this one is a question I'd like answered especially when it is so unnecessary. I wasn't the only person in the audience who laughed out loud at some of the terrible scenes in this film and I can only hope that Paul Anderson isn't allowed to make any more films although with him already signed on for Resident Evil 2 it seems the movie going public will be bored by his awful movies for many years to come. An man sitting behind me in the cinema commented, once the film had finished, that it was "The best film I've ever seen" I can only assume this was the first film this person had ever seen.

This was one of the greatest cartoons of my childhood, I wish it'd run for a bit longer because it was funny and very well written. Based loosely on the second film "Return of the killer tomatoes" it only ran for 2-3 series, and I'm pretty sure the second series was also called "Return of the killer tomatoes" Had the very catchy theme tune from the film but only John Astin returned to voice it. It would be great to see it again but I imagine it's nearly impossible to track it down now. Like the other great cartoon series based on a low budget film, "Toxic crusaders", it added to the original film/s