Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

So much average

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The passage of time (now 1/28/11) heals all wounds. This flick may have been a laughing stock after release in 1987 but the passage of time has added new dimensions enabling the viewer to see it again from many different angles; one of which is the involvement of Norman Mailer who now possesses the mystical aura of a great artist post mortem. The campy acting and over the top attempts at noir now actually enhance this film. As a bonus there is the Cape Cod filming location with some wonderful views of the Cape in winter. The plot is complicated and almost rises to the level of a good screwball comedy although in this case the comedy is definitely black. Lots of bodies to be moved from place to place as the characters frantically try to stay one step ahead of whatever is threatening them at the moment. In the end, all is satisfactorily resolved and each character has been dealt with appropriately by fate. I thought that the last five minutes contained some of the best black comedy I've ever seen, all topped off by the happy fairy tale ending.

Outside of some nice location shooting in and around Provincetown, this is just awful, incompetently made from start to finish. Ryan O'Neal, in one long lugubrious flashback, tries to explain to his Dad why there's severed heads in his basement and a tattoo on his arm. The problem all started, you see, when he answered a SCREW ad.....Bad acting, ranging from stiff and wooden (O'Neal, Rosselini) to over the top (Tierney, who nevertheless gets a couple of good lines in, and Hauser, hamming it up as a semi-psychotic sheriff). Prose as purple as all get-out, probably inevitable when you consider Mailer's involvement. Incompetently put together, mostly told in flashback for reasons I can't understand, other than Mailer couldn't figure out a better way to get the information in. A story that doesn't make a lick of sense, although future scholars of Mailer will have to see this to see all of Mailer's issues dramatized: mostly women as either whores or maternal mothers who entrap you and faux Hemingway macho romanticism. Laugh out-loud funny at some points, although I'm not sure if it has enough brio to recommend it to fans of bad movies, as not a lot really happens, all in all.Better just to avoid it.

This is one of my favorite movies. A strange mixture of seemingly unintentional humor , macabre plot twists, and the charm of off-season Provincetown. I wouldn't call it a drama. HILARIOUS. Patty L. is a real overdone nostril flaring trailer park siren. Ryan O'Neil seems to play the straight man to everyone else. I don't know how he maintained such a bland facade - I guess that's his style. He mostly stood around looking haggard, and so managed to provide something like a foil for all the circus freaks. At one point in the beginning of the film during a scene with his hard drinking crustacean of a father (L. T. is great), I thought I saw something like a suppressed smile cross the faces of both actors - a great moment that I'm sure was totally unintentional. Who wouldn't crack under the weight of all the corny dialoge? Contains the funniest dad and son out "fishing" in the rowboat at night scene ever filmed. I can still hear the foghorns. Despite all the corniness, its all somehow...so...mesmerizing....

When Lawrence Tierney utters the line that gives Tough Guys Don't Dance its title, he evokes the stoic, hard-boiled codes of post-war noir, felt in films he made like Born to Kill, The Bodyguard and The Devil Thumbs A Ride. And when Isabella Rossellini shows up, she suggests David Lynch's kooky and subversive Reagan-era suspense movies like Blue Velvet. These homages mark two of the many streams that flow into Norman Mailer's rhapsody on themes of sexual intrigue, multi-tiered duplicity and garish murders. (Mailer directed his movie from his 1984 novel.) It's a baroque contraption that comes close to self-parody - and may even cross the threshold - but neither is it just a fling at film making by a celebrity author intoxicated by his own publicity. The forlorn setting is Cape Cod under the sign of Sagittarius: the dunes and the bars empty, and the Atlantic is choppy and gunmetal grey. Ex-con Ryan O'Neal (his boyish superstardom well behind him) has been drinking heavily since his wealthy if white-trash wife (Debra Sandlund) left him; one morning he wakes to find a tattoo on his arm and his jeep's upholstery soaked in blood. Circumstances lead him to a burrow where he stashes his marijuana harvest; in it he finds the severed heads of his wife and a woman he had picked up (along with her boyfriend) a few nights before. The clues he starts piecing together lead him back down paths that wend through his own none-too-savory past. There's the out-of-town `couple' with whom he had spent a hard-drinking night (Frances Fisher and R. Patrick Sullivan); a woman he had once loved (Rossellini) now married to Provincetown's sadistic Chief of Police (Wings Hauser); another woman he had met when she was married to a wife-swapping Christian preacher (Penn Jillette) and who later wed a rich, spoiled Southern boy (John Bedford Lloyd) then, ultimately, O'Neal, whom she recently left. Helping him find his way is his gruff, cancer-ridden father (Tierney). What plot line there is hangs on cocaine (maybe) and several millions, but that's but a pretext for Mailer to worry the preoccupations, even obsessions, which crop up again and again in his work, most notably the yin/yang of eroticism and violence. The women come across as predatory sirens but end up being almost beside the point - they're prizes for sexual competition between males, conflict that shades into edgy attraction, right up to taunting flirtation. (The movie is loaded with homosexual references, generally pejorative - the bisexual boyfriend is even given the name `Pangborn' - and the continuum of couplings, both on screen and in the back story, results in a very kinky daisy chain in which everybody save Tierney might just as well have slept with everybody else. Mailer comes close to suggesting that two men who have slept with the same woman share an implicit homosexual relationship themselves.) Coming to Tough Guys Don't Dance expecting anything like a conventional suspense film (even something `post-' or `neo-') is to court disappointment. One comes for Mailer, who's like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead: When he's good, he's very, very good, but when he's bad, he's horrid. How the proportions weight out in this movie can be argued, but adventurous and provocative nuggets nestle among some very bad choices (the acting runs the gamut from rather good to execrable, often within the same performance). Caveat spectator: wildly uneven and sometimes grotesquely macho, Tough Guys Don't Dance is far from negligible.