Fantastic!

Absolutely the worst movie.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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.

Undeterred by his largely mediocre directorial debut in Gator, Burt Reynolds once again plants his behind in the director's chair for The End, a dark comedy about terminal illness and death. As in the case of Gator, here we have a film which fails to fulfil its potential – sure, it rises to a few comic highlights and features a pretty good performance from Reynolds himself, but overall the film is tediously drawn-out and can't seem to make up its mind what it wants to be.Young, good-looking Wendell 'Sonny' Lawson (Burt Reynolds) learns that he has a toxic blood syndrome and will soon die. Taking the most negative estimates of his remaining life expectancy for fact, he believes he will be gone within three months. Sonny visits his young girlfriend (Sally Field) for one final tender interlude (or "a pity f@ck" as he phrases it); he visits his odd-couple parents, his ex-wife, his estranged daughter. He even attempts to attend a confession at church, only to end up seeing a novice priest who envies his hell-raising lifestyle rather than helping him to clear his conscience with God. Ultimately, Sonny decides to commit suicide… but his attempt to do so is unsuccessful and he ends up in a lunatic asylum where he befriends schizophrenic Marlon Borunki (Dom DeLuise). Marlon helps Sonny time and again to end his life, each attempt becoming more farcical and over-the-top than the one before. Could t be that Sonny doesn't really want to end his life after all? The first half of the movie is better than the second, with some philosophical black comedy concerning the preciousness of life and the inevitability of death. Several scenes are painfully unspooled during this first half, but at least in these early scenes the film seems to have a sense of its own morbid fascination. The second half descends into uneven and ill-fitting slapstick, with DeLuise mugging away madly as Reynolds' comrade-in-lunacy. DeLuise is OK in the role but the entire second section seems strangely unconnected to the first half, creating a jarring swing in mood and style from which the film never truly recovers. The notion that 'death is funny' as a cinematic theme is a strange beast which needs to be handled with an expert touch to have any chance of working. In this case, it nearly works but ultimately doesn't quite pull it off. The End is a near-miss… but a miss nonetheless.

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.

Some great scenes and imaginative ideas hold interest for the first half of the movie, but once Dom De Luise takes over, ironic satire is dwarfed by outrageous slapstick, and what remains is a feast for those who wish to see a 1970's updating of The Three Stooges, but the satirical dark humor of the first half is then rendered meaningless, except for one inspired bit near the very end of the film. If you don't mind a lot of slapstick, you should find this very amusing.