People are voting emotionally.

Just perfect...

Great Film overall

As Good As It Gets

Theatrical Film that Plays and Looks like a Movie-of-the-Week. Maybe because 23 Minutes were Cut to get that PG-13 Rating. Another Brain-Dead, Clueless Misstep by the Suits at the Studio.Because what They got and what the Film Turned into was a Pale, somewhat Palatable Picture that Flopped Miserably at the Box-Office and with Critics.It's Not a Bad Movie and does have a Good Cast with John Travolta, Vince Vaughn, and Steve Buscemi. James Lashley gives a Good Tween Performance with a lot of Screen Time. The X-Wife and Wife is Played by Rebecca Tilney who is so Let-Down by the Script that She Barely Registers.Overall, it's Inoffensive and Slightly Suspenseful, but aside from Vaughn's Intimidation of the Youngster, nothing much Disturbing happens.Note...Director Harold Becker's other "Kid in Peril" Thriller "Mercury Rising" (1998) is a great and very underrated Movie that is a "Sleeper" out there waiting to be rediscovered.

The title I must say is cleverly catchy. Vaughn in one of his best roles, where he actually acts, plays a man with a not so inviting past, and is prone to violence. Only problem is, he's about to marry Travolta's ex, Teri Polo, who's juvenile of a son is unaccepting of the arrangement, distrustful of him. Travolta too isn't too happy about this either, but his son's words of warning fall on death ears, as this sounds like just another ploy, to get Mummy And Daddy hitched again. Vaughn is really unnerving in this. Too, at the most baddest of timing, a shady acquaintance of Vaughn's, (Buscemi, who's very good) pops back into his life threatening to put a rift into Vaughn's seemingly happy life, by spilling the beans, where soon he has to be taken out of the equation. Domestic Disturbance comes off pretty much as a barely adequate psychological thriller/drama if something that just slips through, to earn a cinema release. It's mostly a drama than anything else, no real thrills or surprises at all, this, more a disappointment, where this is from the guy who brought you Sea Of love and Malice. Travolta isn't anything special. In fact he's rather ordinary where ex (Polo) is much better where the son was very good too. Most twists of suspense fall flat, where this film could of been much more. What has eventuated, is a sheer just slipping through the cracks, thriller, one that rides on a linear or thin plot. The opening beaty music score with daunting tones was about the best thing I liked about the film. Lightweight, standard drama fare.

Frank Morrison (John Travolta) is a divorced father of a boy (Matt O'Leary) who is having trouble with the split. His ex-wife Susan (Teri Polo) is getting remarried to Rick Barnes (Vince Vaughn). At the wedding, Ray (Steve Buscemi) from Rick's past raises some suspicions. Rick may not be the nice guy that everybody thinks that he is.It's a thriller filled with all the dangers without any compelling characters. It actually starts with the kid character who is unlikeably angry. He's the key to it all. We need to like him and root for him. Then there is the unimpressive story. It piles everything on without any reservation. It overwhelms. The police work is laughable. The film certainly holds nothing back. There is no subtlety here. This is a too by-the-book thriller that tells you everything that's going to happen in the first 15 minutes.

How is one to react to a film whose idea of a chief source for dramatic content, indeed entertainment, is the ambiguity surrounding whether or not a frail and insecure twelve year old boy is going to get his either head bashed in or is going to fall foul of being suffocated to death? Broken down into its rawest of forms, Harold Becker's 2001 film Domestic Disturbance is a cheap; flimsy; nasty 89 minute exercise in sleazy thrills pumping through the motions and applying deadening logic in the process of begging the audience for some sort of reaction: "Look! Look at that! React, go on; react!" Prominent British director Alfred Hitchcock of oft Hollywood residence would call on the unexpected; would call upon the unpredictable and the outrageous, but would almost always be able pull it back by the end in a manner that would see it sync the preceding actions up with what the truth of the matter really was. Things were preordained and made sense in most of Hitchcock's films, but the nifty nature of most of his thrillers were that they were never channelled in a glaringly obvious manner at the time of their happening.Domestic Disturbance film will begin with some disfigured opening titles in the mould of Hitchcock's famous thriller Psycho, itself a film that happened to insert into proceedings a dangerous man appearing friendly. In a similar mould to that of the aforementioned thriller's part-time lead Marion Crane, we witness a car driving what appears to be an awfully long way over these titles; a prominent theme tune inferring a certain amount of dread overlying proceedings and things kick off expansively on a bright day to some fancy camera-work, but in essence, the only item connecting Becker's tedious thriller to Hitchock's masterstroke is that of the fact his villain here played the villain there in a 1998 remake.The film settles into following that of a boat builder in Frank Morrison, played by John Travolta; a charming and upstanding individual with a career in something that has him create items in a very articulate, very precise manner for the pleasure of others. Here is a man whose kindness extends so far, that he is willing to risk his business disappearing altogether due to his generosity; he's a well natured, everyday sort of a guy with his feet on the ground and head in the right place: when the new owners of a fancy boat he's just built them celebrate with champagne, he opts out for a straight-up beer. Frank is a man carrying out a craft that was taught to him by that of his father; now doing his utmost in passing on said trades downwards onto his own son, the aptly played Danny (O'Leary), without ever necessarily being forcing or overbearing in the process.Through some insane instance or two, Teri Polo's Susan has split from our Frank and opted instead to shack up with Vince Vaughn's Rick Barnes; a guy whose stock price in a pharmaceutical company went sky-high and as a result, retreated out to this idyllic community of yachts and warm weather to start enjoying life. With Danny arrives various issues of delinquency and rebellious behaviour. I suppose you would be on edge if your father was as kind as Travolta is here and if your home was one of those detached, whitewashed residences from around the late 18th Century you might get in places like Maine - yeah, I guess any kid almost have to be on the Ritalin from day one in that domestic set up. Danny's problems are put to us solely so as to pump up suspense during later reveals, suspense born out of whether anyone's going to believe this unruly kid and what he says. Surprise: they don't.Things seems to work out well in the beginning; Frank bears no grudge towards Rick nor Susan and they marry without issue. It's here things get tricker; Danny's ending up unnoticed in the boot of his new step-father's automobile has him witness the murder of one of Rick's old "business cohorts", whose true reasons for being in the sleepy town are more broadly linked to Rick's real persona. One thing leads to another, and Danny falls under the watchful evil-eye of his new relative as Susan idly stands by and Frank maintains a deeply routed sense of trust about the situation as everything plays out.Some of the more annoying sequences include that of Teri Polo. When you want a passive, dopey, mandatorily stupid middle aged blonde female character, whose voice could cut through panes of glass, you go to someone like Teri Polo to play the (delete as appropriate) wife/girl-friend/partner whose hapless task it is to spout all the customary dialogue and patronising crap to her kid once the catalyst happens and no one believes him. There was another instance of it happening in a film from the same year: Joe Johnston's Jurassic Park sequel, in which Téa Leoni (why do all these annoying women and their names look the same on paper!?) was required to do all the stuff you shouldn't do at exactly the time it wasn't required: "Honey! Dr. Grant says that's a bad idea." "....says WHAT'S a bad idea?" The film is all surface and zero substance; a series of obligatory set-ups relying on a sense of suspense, although getting very little out of its audience bar the proverbial clipboard complete with sheet of paper housing a list of phrases; some tickable empty squared boxes beside them and a chunky HB pencil, that falls flat on its face in what is a trudging, unholy mess of a picture.