I love this movie so much

Good movie but grossly overrated

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Whenever I see a review that accuses the film of being boring, I usually assume that the reviewer is a teenaged moron with the attention span of a radish and approximately the same intelligence. And then I watch the film and find it utterly captivating. Not this time!At risk of sounding like a teenaged moron, I must say that Random Hearts was totally boring. I mean an utter snooze-fest. Soporific. Mind-numbingly dull. Pointless. Tedious. Monotonous. And also way too long.The paper-thin plot could have made a decent enough 1 hour drama, but here (for a budget of 64 million bucks!!!) a narrative that could easily be described in one sentence gets dragged out to over two hours of bumbling, inept story-telling; lousy pacing from both director and editor, a sizable array of respected actors being utterly wasted/misused, recycled music that is almost identical to The Firm (same director and composer) with splashes of Tootsie (same director and composer) and the clumsiest, most ill-conceived and poorly executed subplot (padding) I've ever seen in a movie that wasn't made by 16-year-old film students.Altogether an amateurish, lazy, and execrable waste of time.

Okay, Billy Wilder got their first with Avanti in which Jack Lemmon and Juliette Mills journey to Ischia to claim the respective bodies of his father and her mother who have been killed in a road accident, only to discover that they have been meeting on the island for years clandestinely. They start out as antagonists and end up in the sack, natch. Here Sydney Pollack puts a little spin on it inasmuch as Ford and Scott Thomas are not on a vacation island thousands of miles from home when - in this case - their spouses rather than parents - fail to survive a plane crash. Pollack also allows us to see both Ford and Scott Thomas at work whereas Lemmon on Mills had left their day jobs behind. Still there are enough similarities for plagiarism to rear its ugly head, so what else is knew. This eluded me on release and I found a Russian version in a Thrift Shop, recognized Scott Thomas on the box, know she always delivers so took it home. I was pleasantly surprised, especially after reading the first few pans here on IMDb. Scott Thomas was good as ever and a tad warmer than she often plays and works well with Ford who probably was, as someone remarked, a touch old for the role. Overall I enjoyed it and may well give it another whirl in a year or so.

I decided to watch this on cable because it was made by Sydney Pollack and stars Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott-Thomas.I wish I hadn't. Or perhaps I wish I'd known something about who the writers were. Because this was about as bad as a Hollywood movie can get. Every cliché you can think of, and all of them put in the most obvious places.I can sort of see how it managed to attract the sort of money that's needed to make a Hollywood movie with that sort of star power, because if you take the elements one by one, all of them would sound OK. It's just that they were put together in a manner that makes no sense whatsoever.It's a waste of 131 minutes.

With a story like this, maybe it couldn't have been paced well anyway. But Random Hearts is like a glossy, stillborn mess that just sort of sits there and waits for you to decide when to turn the channel. Normally the late Sydney Pollack brought a lot more to his films, but here he must have thought star power could be enough. The story is implausible at best, and maybe just a step ahead of ludicrous. Tough Internal Affairs cop and female congressman from New Hampshire lose their spouses in a plane crash. The congresswoman wants to forget the whole thing and move on, but the inquisitive nature of the cop keeps him searching for answers. Finally, after the viewer has long since lost interest in the movie, the two begin an affair as hard to believe as Ted Danson and Whoopie Goldberg. There is WAY too much time dedicated to a subplot involving crooked cops, and this whole angle should have been written out. The whole thing plays out very, very slowly.The acting is good enough, and it is the film's only saving grace. Ford is dour and reserved as the grizzled cop. Thomas is believable and even likable as the politician whose biggest care seems to be if she should run for office again or not. She seems at peace instantly when she learns of her husband's death. The thought of these two having an affair together just isn't plausible, though. No way. It would be easier to take if the film didn't waste so much time with its subplots and parsed dialog. Pollack tries to use similar music to what he used in The Firm to liven things up, but this only makes us recall how much better that film was. And it was far from great. But that is the subject of another review perhaps some day.Was there a good way to tell such a contrived story? Not sure, but this film is a failure. In many ways, it began the downfall of Harrison Ford who has seen his career sag in recent years. Even though it was no classic, the last Indiana Jones film was the best work he's done in years. Random Hearts is essentially a waste of a good cast, director, and over two hours of your time. 4 of 10 stars.The Hound.