Desperate Hours (1990)

Very best movie i ever watch

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Lawyer Nancy Breyers (Kelly Lynch) is defending robber and murderer Michael Bosworth (Mickey Rourke) for killing a guard in prison. She helps him escape but she falls behind. Albert (David Morse) and his brother Wally Bosworth (Elias Koteas) drive the getaway. Brenda Chandler (Lindsay Crouse) releases Nancy to track down Bosworth. Tim (Anthony Hopkins) and Nora Cornell (Mimi Rogers) are splitting up their family with their children (Shawnee Smith, Danny Gerard). He's broken up with his girlfriend and looking to reunite but she insists on selling the house. Michael and his men take over the house and keep the Cornells hostage. He makes contact with Nancy as he waits for her to join them.Director Michael Cimino remakes the 1955 film. He's trying way too hard to be stylish. Some of the acting is too over-the-top. If he could dial some of it back, the movie could be an intense crime thriller. Micky Rourke can be an intense bad guy without any help but Cimino insists on pushing it. Everybody is overacting. The worst is probably Lindsay Crouse. Cimino is using every camera move and dramatic music. It's a little ridiculous to release Nancy but the call to her apartment is a little more ridiculous. The cops could easily be listening on the other end. It's not as if the message is in code. The movie could have been great but Cimino's relentlessness squanders the work of some great actors.

This 1990 flick is not only unbelievable it is NUTS from start to finish.Lets see in acting- Very poor and I hated every characterPlot was so stupid it should have been burned as a screen Play before it got started.Dumb and misplaced scenes that are exaggerated and just none sense. For example the playing of the Red River valley and so sort of ploy to make the audience feel sorry for the creep the the cops shot in the river.By the way, the best cinema was not the movie, rather the Nature scenes with the wild horses.Everything about this sad flick tells me its director and the actors have finished their careers.Just terrible, so if you want awful, get this as a 2.00 DVD and laugh at it, that's all its good for.

Michael Cimino delivers another unfocused, meandering "epic."Like Cimino's "The Sicilian," this movie is an adaptation of a novel. And like that earlier film, this one is dragged down by elliptical and illogical story points.Cimino's weakness as a director is his inability to distinguish between cleanly complex story lines and unnecessarily complicated story machinations. Like "The Sicilian" this film sputters forward in stuttering starts and maddening stalls.How so many fine actors came to agree to be in this movie is a mystery. The script is so illogical at times that it stops you cold with wonder. Didn't anyone notice how inconsistent Mickey Rourke's character was? How unbelievable the characters' motivations and actions were in so many scenes?A few glaring examples: when the teenage boy shows up demanding to keep his date, it would have been simple to have the father tell him she was sick and asleep and couldn't be disturbed. Instead, the consummately cold-blooded and brilliantly devious villain sends the girl out on the date, trusting her not to run right to the police for help? Even worse, she complies.And when the boy does first arrive, he mentions not one word about the massive police barricades he just passed on his way to the house.The interaction between the law officers is just as nutty. Lindsey Crouse is a shrill feminazi barking orders, until her lamely contrived "character change."With three screenwriters on board, it would normally be hard to fathom exactly what went wrong. But checking the credits, we find that two of them had previously collaborated on several much better movies. The third is the original writer, who had a hand in the screenplay, as well as having penned the novel and a play based on it. My guess is that Cimino deserves the blame. Based on his earlier works, he seems to think long and rambling equates to epic. One telling scene set in a beautiful outdoor setting, with music ripped off from a John Ford western, testifies to Cimino's self-grandiose vision.This film wouldn't be nearly as painful to sit through if Cimino was less talented at handling actors and placing his camera. It's too bad he has such rotten story sense. Apparently he needs a stronger, more intelligent producer than DeLaurentiis and better story development executives to reel him in.

I am a big Mickey Rourke fan from his string of hits in the 80's. I kind of fell off the bandwagon during the 90's, finding his choice of films to be somewhat uninspiring. Still a great actor, just seemed to be having some trouble picking quality projects. Seeing 'Sin City' brought me back (great role, great acting, great film!), so I picked up 'Desperate Hours' and watched it last night. While the supporting characters could have been better written (Kelly Lynch & Mimi Rogers' characters fell flat), the scenes between Rourke & Anthony Hopkins were wonderful! Elias Koteas as Rourke's brother was forgettable, but David Morse's character of Albert was very interesting. Somewhat like a big dumb 'Lenny' to Rourke's 'George'. Like another reviewer I was reminded of Humphrey Bogart's 'Duke Mantee' in the 1936 film 'Petrified Forest', but Rourke's 'Michael Bosworth' was a little more homicidal and more of a loose cannon. If you like Rourke & Hopkins, you will enjoy watching 'Desperate Hours.'