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Pretty Good

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Wayne 'Mad Dog' Dobie (Robert De Niro) is a lonely crime scene investigator with his partner Mike (David Caruso). He likes his neighbor Lee (Kathy Baker) but she is abused by her police boyfriend. One night, he rescues Frank 'The Money Store' Milo (Bill Murray) from being held hostage in a convenience store robbery. Frank turns out to be a mob boss and sends barmaid Glory (Uma Thurman) to be his companion for a week. Frank also sends Harold (Mike Starr) to watch over them.Bill Murray and Robert De Niro are switching roles in this. It's a bit quirky to have Murray as the mob boss while De Niro is the romantic lead. This is a lot light quirky but no big laughs. Uma Thurman is endearing. The relationship is charming. It has some darker tones but it never gets too dark. It's an odd rom-com but it does work on a certain level.

"Mad Dog and Glory" is a movie that opens pretty well, but runs out of plot about halfway in. Even worse than that: it also runs out of jokes, which is a problem when you're making a comedy. The second half of the movie is mostly a straight-forward romantic story between Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman, and it just isn't that interesting. The acting is obviously good, but the characters are just bland. And generally romantic movies get all their power from predictability, but here you really just groan at how stilted it all is. A surprisingly convincing Bill Murray features in a crime subplot that shows some promise, but in the end barely anything is done with it. "Mad Dog and Glory" is just full of missed opportunities, it had chances at being a lot of different things but chose the lamest route. Worth it for De Niro, but barely.

Comcast cable lists this movie as a comedy. IMDb lists it as comedy/drama. I found no comic moments in it. Yes, the Bill Murray character attempts some stand-up comedy. But his jokes are flat and his delivery too.It also fails as a drama because we really get no explanation for the behavior of the characters. How did the police crime scene photographer (De Niro) earn the nickname "mad dog"? Is it normal for crime scene photographers to carry weapons and to interact socially with detectives? Why does the mob boss (Bill Murray) attempt to do night club comedy? Why does the mob boss' henchman take his scotch with milk? What's with the mob boss taking advice from a psychotherapist? There are a couple of slug fest scenes between cops and the mob, with kicks to the ribs when someone is down, heads bumped into walls, etc. Yet injuries are only superficial, no broken bones or concussions, just a few cuts.

If you don't like movies that are adequately summarized in a 20 second spot, if you do like to see actors work against stereotypical expectations and do it well, if you don't believe people or endings are all good or all bad and you're OK with that, this might be a movie you will want to add to your collection. DeNiro is doing the expected only in that he is practicing his patented shape shifting technique -- I found his characterization both believable and involving. Murray gives his first great serious performance -- who knew he could be menacing? Uma is hard to figure, in the way conflicted people often really are. David Caruso gives the most out-there performance I have seen from him, and in this movie it works. (I didn't know him in his first TV cop series, but this character is nothing like the one he plays in CSI Miami.) You might even find yourself rethinking what really happened, and liking that, too.