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Good movie but grossly overrated

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

First off, the atmosphere is just not there. The 1967 film had black and white photography and a truly inspired score that really put you in the mood, and in the time and place. As usual in films that try to take you back to more innocent times - in this case rural 1959 Kansas - they get the art direction and costumes down and just get the personalities of the people all wrong. In reality, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were just inches from turning on each other like wolves many times after the crime. Here they tussle a little, but the real dark differences between them are just not shown. Hickock was in actuality the stronger and the more sociopathic of the two, here he is shown as just a carefree womanizer with a criminal bent for theft. Likewise, the actual deep remorse that Perry Smith felt over the murders is not shown, nor is the fact that he was the weaker of the pair, and a dreamer. In fact, Perry is shown as the stronger of the two.Not only are the criminals shown as not that menacing, the townspeople are shown as more modern in their speech patterns than was actually true. In a town where it really was true that EVERYBODY went to church every Sunday, where it really was true that a romance between a Catholic and a Methodist was doomed to failure, the female owner of the local diner is not going to yell across the room to a man who is a stranger to her "You bet your butt I do!" in response to how good a cup of coffee she makes.Of course at the end, the details of the crime are shown - at least from Perry Smith's viewpoint - because today people are used to seeing that kind of thing in the news and on broadcast TV - a family killed by complete strangers. In the 1967 film the details of the grisly murders would have been out of the question since the production code was technically in force for another couple of years.If you get a chance to see the 1967 version, it's a toss-up as to whether or not this one is worth your time. It is not bad, it is just not up to the standards of the original theatrical film.

To me, Eric Roberts performance as Perry in this overlong version of "In Cold Blood" is outstanding and memorable. That is not to say that overall the performances are anything to nitpick about, it's just that Roberts is the one to watch. On the downside, the 180 minutes it takes to tell this tale of murder in Kansas, appears stretched to the max. It seems to take forever for Dick Hickock (Anthony Edwards) and Perry Smith (Eric Roberts) to reach their destination of Holcomb Kansas. On the plus side there is far more character development than in the original Robert Blake, Scott Wilson film. If this was 120 minutes, it would have been terrific. - MERK

Meticulously detailed, way too much so, making this a very long and drawn out version of the famed novel. It's admirable they wanted to include as much of the book in the film, but sometimes being more selective in what you include is an asset in a movie. It does have respectable period detail, and it is well acted by everyone, good cinematography. It's main problem is it's extreme length and the fact it takes way too long to climax. . Still, there are rewarding moments along the way. It is surprisingly subdued and non violent. The 1967 Richard Brooks version is far better and much shorter. Check out a very young Ryan Reynolds who plays Bobby Rupp.

Like others, I have seen and studied most of the books and films concerning the Clutter Killings, including a few dramatic works thematically based on the actions and psycho-mythology of the participants to the crime -- including Capote himself. As to Capote, I cannot forgive him for willfully withholding Perry Smith's confessions, intimacies and writings from even the defense counsels. I believe truths and facts Capote "reserved" for his "book," which required for Capote two guilty verdicts and capital punishment, would almost certainly have sustained a successful insanity defense for Perry Smith even under the old McNaughton Rule. Capote himself could never write another major literary work after "In Cold Blood." Shame and guilt. In my opinion, he willingly encouraged and planned the brutal capital punishment to provide the spectacular ending he required for his book/drama. To him, both men HAD to die for his book to succeed. The book had to justify itself by pretending it was about the horror of capital punishment. His actions and silence assured that ice-cold conclusion.Capote's book is not truth. It is not factual or journalistic. It is drama and melodrama spiced with his own creatively psychotic imagination. What most people consider the virtues of the contemporaneous first movie are stark images of Capote's mind, which may have been the most cold-blooded aspect of all. No wonder viewers ironically but necessarily prefer Blake's performance. That actor IS the nightmare from Capote's dishonest imaginings.So who is to say how the two killers should be played? Who is to judge what could make an essentially poetic psychotic snap from excessive courtesy and kindness to "do it now" killing? I agree with the few who see in Eric Roberts' work a magnificent performance, Shakespearean in its range, yet played with heartbreaking sincerity. Anthony Edwards takes a much safer "attitude mode" to create a smarmy Hickok; but he is one-dimensional and boring, with only a few notes in his television range. Roberts is almost four-dimensional, adding physical weakness and agony to a powerful animal body, a Frankenstein Creature who thinks in poetry and knows exactly what NOT to do. Like Leopold apropos Loeb, Robert's Perry Smith is hopelessly in love with an evil man. Without Hickok or a man of his particularities, Perry Smith would not have brought his psychotic mind into a world of horrors. He fears himself more than he fears anything else in life.Given the freedom from Capote's death grip on the consciousness of the Clutter killings, Roberts and Edwards are free to create original personalities and psychoses to craft a different and new production of the drama. Same facts, some of the same lines from the case record, but deeper, more complex, with clearly titanic psychotic stresses -- indeed Roberts is so good at this fluidic madness that he physically and facially demonstrates in every moment how little awareness he has of where or who he is.What many of our reviewers dislike about this film, Roberts in particular, is that cold-blooded killing isn't shown the way they expect and have been manipulated to demand. That is because here we are seeing a far more profoundly realistic "interpretation of life and death" than Capote could ever create -- a real Tragedy.The actual cold-blooded killer, Mr. Capote, and his hypocritically artistic "non-fiction novel" do not control these interpretations and performances.If "In Cold Blood" and Capote's effect on life, literature and truth matters as much as scholars say, then it takes guts as well as talent to portray the truth, or a version of the truth, that is not the rank, cowardly lie drawn up from the fathoms of Capote's own abyss.