City by the Sea
September. 06,2002 RVincent LaMarca is a dedicated and well-respected New York City police detective who has gone to great lengths to distance himself from his past, but then makes the terrible discovery that his own son has fallen into a life of crime.
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Reviews
Very disappointing...
Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .
Excellent adaptation.
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Drug addict Joey LaMarca (James Franco) defends himself and kills dealer Picasso. He is injured and goes home to his skeptical mother (Patti LuPone). His estranged father NYPD homicide detective Vincent LaMarca (Robert De Niro) and his partner Reg Duffy (George Dzundza) are given the case of the dead drug dealer. Spyder (William Forsythe) is also after his associate's killer. Michelle (Frances McDormand) is Vincent's girlfriend. Gina (Eliza Dushku) is Joey's girlfriend and baby mama. Fellow addict Snake rats out Joey.There are good actors doing solid work. This material could be given a more grim style. This represents a slow slide in the quality of director Michael Caton-Jones. This should be a more intense thriller and a more heart-breaking tragedy. I keep thinking that this movie should be better. The biographical nature does muddy the story. There is an overall lack of intensity.
This film is just awful. The only redeeming quality this film possesses is that they cast Eliza Dushku.That's it, folks. The people saying that it was good have an optimism complex larger than John Goodman. From Frances McDormand's awkward body language (and face touching) to Bob DeNiro's stilted play-up of father/son tensions to John Forsythe's contrived bad guy persona, this movie is downright terrible. I was surprised to learn it was made in 2002, since the score made it sound like it was from the mid-90s.And the fact that Eliza Dushku is hot doesn't really matter since she disappears 3/4 of the way through the movie after telling Bobby DeNiro that she is going back to using again. This is after the audience got no indication that she was having any trouble, and even witnessed her tell James Franco's character to stay clean earlier on.The film just tries way too hard to be dark. The drug use is visually brief, but referenced throughout. The setting is good (Long Beach, NY), but there's very little past-to-present context besides a few comments by the cast. The father/son element is meant to be two-fold, with DeNiro playing a guy battling his own father and his own son's fates, but by the end of the movie you can tell the writers did not have fun playing with that material.If I could give it negative stars, I would.
In the mid-1990s, Quentin Tarantino argued that his idol Robert De Niro had let quality control in his career slip. "The care in the work isn't there anymore", he noted. Well, if you wanted proof of that argument, this movie is it.Reuniting with his "This Boy's Life" director Michael Caton-Jones (this is easily the worst movie he's ever directed), Robert De Niro sleepwalks his way through this movie for the money. He's overweight and looks utterly bored throughout. Only at the end does De Niro wake up and start trying to come up with something, but by then it's too late to care.Allegedly based on a true story (you could have fooled me, the script is an awful collection of cop clichés and junkie stereotypes), the film concerns the drug-addicted son of a cop who accidentally gets caught up in murders and goes on the run. De Niro plays the father cop who must choose between family loyalty and his job (have a guess which one he chooses. It's obvious from the start).With De Niro on autopilot, it falls to the rest of the cast to try and cover up for him. William Forsythe, De Niro's co-star from "Once Upon A Time In America", is in this as a drug dealer called Spyder (original name, huh? He has a conversation with a junkie that goes "Hey, Snake." "Hey, Spyder." Yup, it's that bad.) George Dzundza crops up as the hero's obese cop partner who gets bloodily murdered (the exact same role he played in "Basic Instinct.") The younger actors playing the junkies do everything obvious and overdo it at that. The only person who comes out of this with any credibility is Frances McDormand who manages to work up something realistic in her scenes with De Niro, but you can't polish a turd and this script is just that.The explanation for De Niro's son turning to drugs is an unbelievable "you-weren't-there-for-me-dad" self-pitying rant at the end. Yes, folks, drug addiction really is that simple. How this script got through to production is a mystery. It's amateur hour nonsense.This movie is so unambitious and uninspired; you have to wonder why they bothered making it at all. Avoid.
If this movie was a gas, it would be inert. Although "inspired by a true story", it's not all that truthful. However, that does not distract from the picture. What matters is that the "action/thriller/drama" contains very little of anything. This is not even a passable "popcorner". It is, however, OK to use as background noise if you are doing some ironing, or tidying up around the home. DeNiro has done so much better, it is a shame to see this trite, flat, boring waste of film stock. Too, it is difficult to see how bad DeNiro is physically. He had to wear a heavily-padded suit to portray Al Capone. He was in top shape for "Heat". Now, he's a puffy, overweight, pasty blob. He and Steven Seagal ought to get a discount membership at Weight Watchers. While living in Shanghai, China, I picked up a copy of the movie for the equivalent of $1.15 - I want my money back.