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Memorable, crazy movie

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Jimmy Kilmartin (David Caruso) is trying to stay clean in Queens. He and his wife Bev (Helen Hunt) have a baby. His cousin Ronnie Gannon (Michael Rapaport) pulls him back into working for Little Junior Brown (Nicolas Cage). Jimmy is arrested. He doesn't rat out Little Junior and in exchange, Bev is taken care of. Bev is forced to work for Ronnie as he cheats her out of the money. Big Junior Brown (Philip Baker Hall) is Junior's father and they own the strip club Baby Cakes. Ronnie gets the recovering alcoholic Bev drunk and she wakes up in his bed the next morning. In shock, she drives off and dies in a car accident. During the funeral, Bev's sister Rosie (Kathryn Erbe) tells Jimmy the truth. To get Ronnie, Jimmy rats out the crew except Ronnie. Believing Ronnie is the actual rat, Little Junior has him killed. Year later with parole coming up, police detective Frank Zioli (Stanley Tucci) threatens to out Jimmy to Little Junior. Jimmy is forced to be an informant on Little Junior. With Big Junior dead, Little Junior is the new boss and the police is actually targeting his business partner Omar (Ving Rhames). Meanwhile, Jimmy has remarried to Rosie and trying to carve out a normal life.Nicolas Cage steals this movie for both good and bad. His character is unforgettable. However, it's so big that the movie loses the thread of an intense noir thriller. David Caruso is fine and so is almost everybody else. Michael Rapaport continues his jittery sleazy bad-influence character. The story is a little long trying to do too much. For example, it would cost nothing to keep Bev around for the whole movie. With a couple of tweaks, Bev and Rosie's characters could have been combined. With some simplification and compression, this would a much tighter thriller.

Why director Barbet Schroder felt it necessary to remake a classic film and then do it so badly is a mystery. David Caruso is awful and the rest of a fine cast wasted in this travesty. The gifted Kathryn Erbe does well in a poorly written role as the woman who stands by Caruso through thick and thin. She is superb but at times the character's devotion seems completely bizarre. Erbe deserved better. Overall, the movie is utterly ridiculous and except for the supporting cast, another David Caruso big screen fiasco. Even with a great director and surrounded by wonderful actors, Caruso just can not carry a motion picture.

I saw the scoring for this film and thought 5.9/10 was just plain wrong and felt the need to give my opinion.Personally, I'm quite a fan of those film noirs/crime dramas from the 40/50s, mainly because of their tense atmosphere and gritty realism and so with this being a remake of a classic original, this was right up my street.All I'm going to say about the movie is that the plot is fast paced, exciting, with several twists and keeps you involved right through to the end.David Caruso got panned by critics for his role in this and I felt that was unjust as I thought his performance and demeanour were just right for the character he was playing.The rest of the cast is great and with some great performances by Ving Rhames, Nic Cage, Stanley Tucci, and in particular Anthony Heald as the scumbag lawyer.As a previous reviewer said, perhaps some people were put off this film by the sheer nastiness of some of the characters, but try to put that to one side and enjoy the ride.I'd probably give this movie a solid 8/10, but because of the overall rating I'm going to give it a 10.

You want to know the best joke I've heard lately? The Kiss of Death remake. Despite having great source material to work from (that being Henry Hathaway's 1947 original), Barbet Schroeder's film might as well have been a comedy, as the level of incompetence on display really is mind blowing. The film features a whole range of well known stars, and almost every single one of them is heinously miscast. Nicholas Cage delivers the silliest role of his career as the babyish gangster 'Little Junior'. Cage's character is this film's answer to Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo, but unlike Widmark; Cage just can't do the extreme psychotic, and succeeds only in making a fool of himself. Samuel L. Jackson isn't given room to breathe, while Helen Hunt, Michael Rapaport and Ving Rhames are entirely wasted. Perhaps the biggest casting mistake was giving David Caruso the lead role. It's hard not to laugh while he's trying to look hard, and the ginger actor looks completely ridiculous throughout. The only actor in the entire film that has been well cast is Anthony Heald (Silence of the Lambs' Dr Chilton), who has a very small role as a lawyer. Kiss of the Death is one of the clearest examples of casting with the poster in mind that I've ever seen.The plot follows an unlucky guy who gets arrested after taking 'one last job' as a favour to his friend. While on the inside, he is asked to rat out his accomplices, and but won't. However, he changes his mind when it comes to the end of his sentence (oh yes). What made the original great was that the story was tight, and by concentrating on just a handful of characters; the audience was able to care for their plight. This movie doesn't benefit from that, as the film needs a whole load of characters so that a load of big names can star, and it harms the film as the whole thing is far too convoluted. Not much thought has gone into any scene in this film either, and certain plot threads seem to come out of nowhere; the lead character's relationship with the babysitter being a good example of an idea that the film simply throws at you. You really need to stretch your imagination with this movie, as several things don't make sense; and the fact that all in all, this film is bad ensures that stretching the imagination isn't easy. The ending is similar to that of the original, but here we don't get the impression that it's come about as a result of the characters; and Samuel L. Jackson's last moment on screen throws mud in the eye of the dark tone that a story like this should have. All I can say is that Kiss of Death is actually an apt name for this film, as Barbet Schroeder and co have embraced a good idea and killed it.