PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

Nessieldwi Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

SnoopyStyle 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.

manjodude It's refreshing to see such old movies now for a change. A young, tough-built Nicolas Cage as a mean gangsta, the pretty Helen Hunt in a 2-minute role as an innocent house wife, a very lean Samuel Jackson as a just cop, and of course David Caruso too. All these actors are huge stars today but if in the mid 90's I were to tell them about their super-stardom future, they might have choked in laughter.About the movie, it's a neat good guy vs the underworld story, very engaging from start to end. The best act was Nicolas Cage's who chills as a baddie. Wish I could have seen more of Helen Hunt though.Verdict: No big shakes but still a cool thriller that's worth watching.

sol1218 (There are Spoilers) Trying to go straight and raise a family ex-convict & car thief Jimmy Killmartin, David Caruso, gets back into his chosen profession by trying to keep his sleazy cousin Ronnie, Michael Rapaport, from getting his brains beat out by his demanding and not too kindly boss Little Junior, Nicolas Cage. Ronnie wants Jimmy to drive an 18 wheeler loaded with stolen cars for his chop-shop business. As you would expect Jimmy gets caught by a cop sting that results in one of the NYPD detectives Calvin Hart, Samuel L. Jackson, getting a bullet in his head but miraculously surviving.Even though Jimmy was set up and deserted by Ronnie he lives by an unbroken and moral code not to rat on any of his fellow hoods. But that's quickly broken when Jimmy's wife Bev, Helen Hunt,is killed in a car crash that Ronnie was responsible for. It turned out that instead of looking after Bev and her and Jimmy's infant daughter Corinna, Lindsay J. Wrinn, Ronnie was taking advantage of Bev while Jimmy was locked up. Also the day she was killed Ronnie got Bev drunk and took her home to his place for both fun and games. Bev waking up from her alcohol-induced sleep ran out of Ronnie's place into her car and, still being under the influence, drove into an oncoming truck killing herself.Realizing what Ronnie did Jimmy agrees with the State prosecutor Frank Zioli, Stanley Tucci, to rat on his fellow car-thieves at a closed door grand jury hearing implicating even himself in number of car robberies but slyly keeps Ronnie's name out of it. The news of the car-theft gang being ratted out by someone from the inside gets back to Little Junior from his mobbed-up lawyer Jack Gold, Anthony Heald. It's then agreed that it had to be Ronnie, since he was the only member who wasn't indicted, who ratted on his gang and in no time at all Little Junior pay him a friendly visit with a half dozen of his goons that turns out to be Ronnie's funeral.Having served his time Jimmy is released from Sing Sing Prison but the aggressive State procurator Zioli has plans for him to get Little Junior in a sting operation which will result in him getting a federal judgeship. Going to Little Junior's Baby Cakes strip club Jimmy has a wire planted on him by the police in order to get evidence. Jimmy gets friendly with the mob boss only to be later shaken down in the club's bathroom to see if he's working for the cops or not. Jimmy realizing what was going down threw away his wire before Little Junior and his boys got to him. As crazy as Little Junior is he still strikes me as a pretty smart cookie being able to sense if he's being set up in a sting operation, with a wiretap. But later he act's so stupidly that he guns down in cold blood an undercover federal agent Omar, Ving Khames, right in front of a shocked Jimmy who's got a wire on him. This in the end can lead to Little Junior to be indited and arrested for murder one. With Jimmy having the incriminating tape it looked like a slam dunk to convict Little Junior but his lawyer Jack Gold comes to his rescue having the evidence thrown out on a technicality; Little junior killed a federal agent thinking that he was hood like himself and even more convincing it was in self-defense! With Little Junior out free Jimmy, who's cover was blown, is now a marked man and with only Det. Hart, who's since become bonded with him, willing to help Jimmy it looks as if it's only a matter of time before he's history. But unknown to Little Junior as well as the double-crossing state procurator Zioli, who promised Jimmy that he and his family would be protected , Jimmy had devised a plan to keep himself alive. And that plan is to use the same method that get him into hot water to get him out of it: the wiretap.The David Caruso came across completely colorless as Jimmy Killmartin showing in most of his scenes almost no emotion at all. The final scene in the movie showed that he, or Jimmy, also wasn't all that bright even though he miraculously survived a assassination attempt on his life. NIcholas Cage as the mob boss Little Junior has a very serious asthma condition but looks and act in the pink of health. He even lifts heavy weights, as well as showgirls, 15 at a time without even breathing hard. Little Junior also viciously beats people up sometimes to death which is very strenuous exorcise for an asthmatic. With the only sign of his asthma condition is the occasionally asthmatic aerosol spry that he uses to keep himself from possibly suffocating to death.Samual L. Jackson as Det. Hart is totally wasted as the good cop who risk his job and life in setting up his bosses in the federal government and NYPD. I also found it odd that Jimmy's wiretaps on both Little Junior and prosecutor Zioli had such an impact of bringing them both down to earth, Little Junior in jail and Zioli facing a serious ethics charge, that can also put him behind bars. When the wiretaps were done without a court order not only making them illegal but even criminal on Jimmy's part! Just earlier in the movie a court ordered wiretap that resulted in getting evidence of the murder of a federal agent, by Little Junior, was thrown out of the same courtroom on the most flimsiest of legal technicalities. But these totally illegal and uncalled for wiretaps, on Little Junior and Zioli, were allowed to stand!

The_Void 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.