Wonderful character development!

Sick Product of a Sick System

Better Late Then Never

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

The movie starts very well, it continues very well, up to the half of it, then it all becomes monotonous and hard to follow. Absolutely blame on the script, because the actors are all excellent, Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Sally Field, Joanne Woodward, and, in smaller roles, Carl Reiner, Strother Martin, Robby Benson and Norman Fell. There are many fun scenes but, overall, the film is a failure, it's not easy at all to make a great comedy about death and suicide. Dom DeLuise is the most hilarious, the jokes about Polish people that his father told him are the funniest of the whole movie. One of the last roles for Myrna Loy and Pat O'Brien.

Burt Reynolds' film "The End" delights me. From beginning to end, the movie charmed me with one set piece after another with relentless gifted performances emerging as the protagonist Wendell Sony Lawson encounters one person after another discounting him and his impending end. The pace seems a tad slow, but that does not diminish the flow of the story. Nothing interferes with that flow.The silliness here works. I think that in some ways Dom Deluise almost overwhelm the second half of the film, but for most viewers his performance seems to make the movie and I suppose it does. I love the confession that Sonny tries to make early in the movie to the unfocused youthful priest played by Robby Benson. The telephone call to an indifference suicide hot line is also lovely, along with the sour milk used to down sleeping pills.I very much liked the score and the editing. Nine migth be tad high, but I do like this film.

Burt Reynolds throws himself in front of and behind the camera in this 1978 gem of a comedy. Not the best comedy that year, but far from the worse. Reynolds may have bit off more than he could chew by directing and acting all in one, but the final product was funny enough for cinemas. Still, without Dom DeLuise, this movie would be far from watchable. It is DeLuise that saves this movie. At sometimes dark, The End mixes mild comedy which delivers this Woody Allen (who wrote the original script) type story. DeLuise is nothing but brilliant as the lovable, yet crazy friend of Reynolds. This movie is nothing but fun. Not the best movie, but a nice story with an interesting cast of characters.

Divorced dad finds out he has an incurable disease; he decides to kill himself before his illness lands him in a hospital ward. What with girlfriend Sally Field acting like a ditz, Father Robby Benson annoyingly clicking his priest's collar against his teeth, mental patient Dom DeLuise overacting like crazy and normally-sane Joanne Woodard playing a nagging harpy, it's no wonder Burt Reynolds wants to die. Trouble is, he directed this sloppy black comedy, which veers wildly from morbid jokes and slapstick to curious seriousness. Kristy McNichol emerges unscathed playing Burt's trusting daughter, though the rest get stuck portraying caricatures, and the handling makes them ugly and pushy. "The End" is tiresomely ego-driven and incompetent. It made me itch. ** from ****