For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Admirable film.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Big City Blues was a failed experiment of a film that would later be repeated successfully in films like Boogie Nights and Crash. It's the story of five characters, two hit men, two drag queens and a prostitute who meet up in a deserted Miami mansion one fateful night.The drag queens Giancarlo Esposito and Arye Gross are the most interesting of the quintet. Especially Esposito who is in a journey of transitioning, but not quite sure if she wants to complete the change. The names in the cast are the hit men, Burt Reynolds and William Forsythe who do their best, but are defeated by a lousy script and poor direction. I can see Reynolds was cast here as he was in Boogie Nights, but in that film there was a cohesion as all the participants were involved in the pornography industry and were all interesting characters. Georgina Cates is the prostitute and she's along for the ride, also defeated by poor direction. Her character as a hooker who aspires for something more could have been a lot better.Crash is a film along the same lines and it was a Best Picture Oscar winner. Would this have turned out as well.

I bought this DVD for $5.99... A Big Mac meal would have been more satisfying, and I'd have change coming. Much too dark... Although the trailer on the DVD looked like it was timed right. For some reason, and it seems to be a recurring theme here in the comments section, 80% of this movie is almost black. The story was a Pulp Fiction-esque wanna be, missing that all important "story" element. These characters are flat and manufactured with no real goal. Or if they had a goal, it wasn't shared with the audience. The tie in at the end was too "hand of god." I know that movies need convenience as a device, but this was just too coincidental. Not that these characters were destined to come together, but the scene that was written solely for the purpose of coming together. "Hey, look at me, I'm Tarantino!" says the director. "No, you're not," says the box office.

If you liked watching Mel Gibson in Million Dollar Hotel then you might enjoy watching Burt Reynolds in yet another film so bad it could never be distributed. I can only attest to the DVD version so maybe the VHS version is better quality wise but the movies night and dark scenes have been so poorly done that everythings seems red. I first thought my DVD players was messed up. It wasn't. If you insist on watching it I recommend you adjust the color on your TV until it is black and white. If you don't you will never be able to get through the film. If you do it will simply remind you of a poor film students attempt to revist the style of Pulp Fiction.

This film describes the experiences of a couple of hit men (one of them Burt Reynolds), a prostitute, and two drag queens over the interval of a few hours on one night in Miami. The convergent storylines eventually bring all the people together at one place and time. The movie was mildly entertaining, but the big problem was that everything happens at night and many scenes were literally under-exposed to the point that it was impossible to see what was happening. In a few scenes you can actually see where they tried to "stretch" the developing process to save the images. Somebody didn't know how to operate a movie camera. Amazing that this film was even released!