Nice effects though.

Just perfect...

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

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

Imagine the Big Lebowski without any laughs, plus a really bad electronic disco music soundtrack, plus really bad film editing, cheap cinematography, plus the most annoying, never-ending credit intro in movie history, plus a really bad script and a lot of improv dialog made up mostly of the F-word.That's 8 Million Ways to Die. The film starts with terrible electronic music under a credit intro where the camera just keeps filming San Diego traffic patterns that have nothing to do with anything else. And this goes on forever. So if you're smart (not like me) you'll get annoyed enough right at this point and turn the piece of trash film off (GOOD CHOICE!).Then we have Det. Matt Scudder (Bridges) and his posse from the sheriff's dept. wearing really cheap uniforms running around a drug house. Scudder shoots the suspect when he takes a baseball bat to the rest of his team.Then he gets suspended from the force, then he becomes an alcoholic, loses his family and job, joins AA, meets Sunny the hooker (the most annoying dingbat since Edith Bunker), who wants to quit taking pipe, but she's afraid of what her pimp might do to her. Scudder tries to pay off Sunny's pimp, but he doesn't want the money and says Sunny is free to quit. But then she gets abducted, murdered, and dumped off a bridge. Scudder is so upset that he falls off the wagon (I would have been glad to get rid of her!), blacks out, and wakes up in the detox ward a week or so later looking like total crap.Then he starts to investigate Sunny's murder. Scudder, Sunny's hooker pal Sarah (Rosanna Arquette), and scummy drug lord Angel (Andy Garcia) argue using the F-word and threaten to kill each other a lot. Angel takes Sarah hostage.Scudder finds out that Angel murdered Sunny, steals a bunch of his cocaine, and holds it hostage to get Sarah back. Then they meet in a warehouse and yell the F-word a lot more at each other and Scudder blows up Angel's coke anyway. But Angel gets away.Scudder takes Sarah home (where of course, she will be perfectly safe, since Angel would never think to try to find her in her own house!). Angel is there waiting and they shoot at each other until Angel gets shot, then runs out of bullets and tries to reload right in front of Scudder. Scudder wisely shoots Angel in the head before he can reload his gun.Scudder and Sarah live happily ever after as members of AA.The end.There!I saved you having to watch the worst film ever to star Jeff Bridges.You're welcome!

Sorry, but I'm gonna have to give a Thumbs Down to "8 Million Ways To Die" despite so many big names involved in it. Hal Ashby's last film had a great beginning, jumbled up in the middle and it was out of salvation at the annoying and louder ending. This film is like sex without orgasm, doesn't have action, doesn't have much excitement, promises a lot and delivers too little and it disappoints a lot.The story involving a ex-cop (Jeff Bridges), his drinking problems and a investigation on the death of a prostitute (Alexandra Paul) is not news in film history and it was good until the middle when he mets Rosanna Arquette, from this point it's all downhill. It lacks interest, it goes in too many talks and almost no action, reaching an ending without any kind of climax. If the performances are quite good (specially Bridges and Andy Garcia playing the villain), the screenplay didn't helped this film at all with too many crime slang's, recycled clichés and obviously a love story that, at my view, shouldn't be there, the connections between characters comes out of the blue and it's too much easy to find out what happened. Worst of all, the villain has a huge lack of evilness, we're never able to see him doing something wrong or menacing.And to think that I was almost thinking that this could be something like "To Live and Die in L.A." (this is a perfect action film), since some obtuse viewers tended to compare with it. And the confusion is not only on screen, there's some controversies between the responsible of this. One of the writers of this film was Oliver Stone, whose original screenplay was changed drastically throughout the filming, and after seeing the final result he wanted his name out of the credits, which was impossible because the credits were already made up. Robert Towne changed the screenplay, and Ashby himself made countless changes and improvisations, and at the end this is what you get: a boring film with nothing much to say. And the last confusion of all, not trying to blame one of my favorite directors of all time, but the producers fired him after finishing the filming, and they kept the whole control over editing and things like that, the final word. It is difficult to say who ruined this movie but all I can say is that the actors cannot be blamed, and neither James Newton Howard's good musical score. The rest is up to you, if you want to see it or not. One of the most unnoticed (with justice) and disappointing films of the 80's. Ashby deserved a better ending in his filmography but we're talking about one of the most underrated directors of all time, who brought us preciosity's like "Harold and Maude" and "Being There" among others. 5/10

4.0 out of 5 stars Release this movie on DVD already!, May 23, 2009 It never ceases to amaze me about how many good movies are only on VHS while some the most crappiest films in recent years get Blu-ray treatment. 8 Million Ways To Die got poor reviews but it was actually pretty good.Jeff Bridges plays Matthew Scudder, a burned out cop whose life goes to shambles after a raid goes wrong. Things in his life don't get any better when he meets a prostitute called Sunny(Alexandra Paul). Sunny ends up getting murdered and Matthew tries to solve the murder.Sure the character development is scant and some of the lines in this movie are howlers(like Sunny exclaiming which part of her anatomy glows in the dark) but the movie is not bad. Jeff Bridges shines as Matthew Scudder and Andy Garcia plays the scummy character of Angel Moldonado well. Rosanna Arquette is pretty good also as the smarmy and snobbish Sarah. These are the performances that keep the movie afloat.Its kind of sad that this underrated drama never got a DVD release. Its like depriving people of seeing a movie that deserves a look of seeing it while shoving crappy films(like anything from Seltzer and Freidberg) down their throats. If you're in the mood for a good drama with a good story and solid acting you cant go wrong with 8 Million Ways To Die.

Hal Ashby being sacked explains a lot; so does the disappearance of Oliver Stone. You can imagine how much tougher and seedier it would have been in Stone's hands. But Ashby, it would seem, tightened up and found his movie in the editing room, as this movie is not quite there. There is a curious lack of incidental music, except when it isn't needed, and what is there tends to foreshadow action. Scudder's initial descent into alcoholism is almost skipped over; you suspect that Stone or Ashby, given half the chance, would have added some detail to the descent. Instead of which Scudder's wife suddenly disappears, he's on his own. Perhaps you can explain this by saying 'blackout' but I think it's an error. The movie is realistically slow, treating the characters as real people, which is perhaps a mistake for the genre. There isn't much action until the very end, and the couple of bits during the film are followed by Scudder blacking out, so we don't get him dealing with the aftermath of these violent events. This is one of the few Block/Scudder novels i haven't read, so I can't comment on how similar to the book it is. My guess would be very, since Block tends to go in for very violent climaxes preceded by Scudder wondering if he'll hit the bottle again. Falls nicely into the Jeff Bridges B-movie crime genre which the Coens picked up on with The Big Lebowski.