Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I have always been a fan of Christian Slater so I might be basis. I was skeptical with the talking fish but Slater and Cuthbert shined bright. For once there wasn't a twist that I saw coming from the beginning of the movie. Slater shows the mental state of someone that is lost in a world that he created. This is a must watch movie and I'm not saying it's the best movie but it is well worth the amount of admission.

I cannot tell you the plot of this movie. I am uncertain what happened, and if I told you a version, you would likely not believe me.Christian Slater plays Bob Maconel, a mousy, picked-on middle aged man. He hallucinates that his goldfish talk to him and bully him. He hallucinates/imagines killing his co-workers.You never know what is his imagination, his hallucination or twists of the screenwriters' mad fantasy.He deals with sadistic bullies for co-workers. One is female, who enjoys coming on to him, then suddenly crying out sexual harassment. I wanted a particularly sticky end for her, but was unsatisfied. Another, the man at the next desk, goes postal.One character is Venessa, a beautiful young woman paralysed from the neck down. She is a self-centred power tripper and tries to force Bob to help her commit suicide. We never know if she can be trusted or if she is just a scheming manipulator who uses Bob as a "spoon" to care for her.You see so many versions of events, you have to put on hold your decision of whether what you just saw was real.The problem with this movie is has no proper protagonist. Bob is just a colourless, mumbling dishrag. It is hard to care one way or the other what happens to him.I thought it odd that no one asked Bob why he had a loaded gun in his desk at the office, with which he shot the worker who went postal. Perhaps in the USA this is common. The only question was why he did not shoot sooner.Venessa explained the clasp on her bra to Bob, her caregiver, who had to bathe, bum wipe and spoon feed for the last few months. Surely by now he would already thoroughly understand female clothing.Much of the plot is Pythonesque. Bizarre things happen and everyone keeps a perfectly straight face and pretends they are ordinary.One amusing scene is Venessa ordering Bob around commanding him not to be "weak" not to let people push him around.The movie just seemed to meander after a shotgun start. I lost interest about half way through.

This movie grew on me. After about the first third of it I was practically ready to give up on it. It had a few scenes that used dark humour effectively, but was mostly just bizarre. Bob (brilliantly played by Christian Slater) was an office grunt, doing the mindless, repetitive, soul-numbingly boring work that no one wants to do but someone has to do, either looked down upon or ignored by his co-workers - a guy with no friends or social life who talks to his fish and one day brings a gun to work, ready to "go postal." In an interesting turn of events, another office grunt has exactly the same feelings, and beats Bob to the postal punch, so to speak, shooting up the office, until Bob uses his own gun to kill him. Bob suddenly finds himself the toast of the town and the office hero - everybody's friend, promoted to "Vice President of Creative Thinking" with a fancy office and big salary, and the object of the office slut's desires. There was a kind of surreal quality to all that, however, that really hadn't appealed to me very much, although the concept was interesting. Where the movie really took off, though, was in depicting the evolution of the relationship between Bob and Venessa (Elisha Cuthbert) - who was left paralyzed in the shooting. At first angry that Bob had saved her life (because she would rather be dead than paralyzed) Venessa eventually connects with Bob. They become friends, then boyfriend/girlfriend, with Bob her protector; the one who cares for her and takes care of her; her "spoon" as Mr. Shelby (William H. Macy) calls him (ie, the one who has to feed her.) The evolution of that relationship was fascinating in itself to watch. Slater did a great job as a guy who's only barely (if that) in touch with reality, while Cuthbert was effective as a beautiful woman who had used her beauty and sexuality to work her way up the ladder, only to have it all taken away from her. Once it gets going, all that would have been an interesting enough study in itself. Then comes the end.I won't give it away, but I can only say that it's one of the all time great "twist" endings that I have ever seen - and I didn't see it coming even for a moment. This is a very dark movie. At times it's funny; at times it's sad; at times it's actually very moving; it's often quite bizarre. After all that, it's a movie you definitely remember. 8/10

I will not bother with any discussion about the technical excellence of Messrs Slater and Macy's performances--there are only two female roles and they are both extremely weak--or about whether this may have been ably directed or shot. You will know why by the time you read the next sentence. In a film whose first 20 minutes and last five minutes only have anything to do with objective reality, all the rest being the fantasy of a delusional, borderline personality, nothing truly meaningful can be said: it's all the hallucination of a madman before he shoots himself rather than killing a half dozen other innocents. This is the kind of film that excites the fevered brains of would be brilliant potential geniuses in their second year of film school. I know, because I went there, and we were all geniuses.But a film that twists and mauls the sensibility of its viewers and then makes no point at all (because if nearly the whole film, or you could say the entire film, is a delusional misfit's fantasy prior to his suicide, nothing in its content can be valid, no matter how well done, striking technically, innovative, or novel it may be...and this film is not novel: Jacob's Ladder was a similar and far more meaningful film. Not innovative, I would say something like Blow-Up is a no-hope movie that really makes a tremendous philosophical point without having to smirk in your face after you watch it all the way through: He Was A Quiet Man does this, just to show you the film makers, like Bob's employers and superiors, know how smart they are, and how dumb you are. And they want you to know that too. Blow-Up respects the audience, is what I mean. This film hates its audience, and wants to screw them up. And you well may be screwed up, after watching this, because you started to really car whether Bob is going to pull himself together and make it, and whether this everyman gets to be a true hero in the face of all these rotten people, but he is just a loser, pretty much the way his superior, played by Jamison Jones, views him. If you're not a golf-playing, hard-drinking, insincere prick, you might as well shoot yourself and get it over with. This film is not striking technically, by now we've seen all kinds of talking animals fronting for the delusions of a psycho: think of Sam in the Summer of Sam. But Spike Lee loves his audience, he is a film lover too. The mind behind this film hates its potential viewers, we are too stupid to get it, so we might as well be deceived the whole bloody way through.Same feeling I had after walking the railroad tracks to get to school as a short cut---a hell of a long slog, and rough on the footwear, with a strong chance of getting blindsided in the end. Go the long way round to avoid this next time.Another bad sign--James Berardinelli really loves it, and he manages to miss the point of just about everything except where to sign his paychecks.