Mad Dog Time

If you are used to seeing Gabriel Byrne in serious roles such as Tom in Millers Crossing or Keaton in The Usual Suspects I recommend you take a look at this film. Even if you are not a fan of Gabriel Byrne in particular, all the actors in this film give really great performances. If you've got about eleven bucks (that is close to nine quid) I say order it online, or rent it from you favorite movie rental place. Guaranteed to make you laugh, whether or not you normally like gangster type movies. Mad Dog Time/Trigger Happy is one of those movies you never forget, and find yourself watching over and over. You will talk about it so much your friends will be begging to borrow it.

I love this movie. It's wacky, funny, violent, surreal, played out in a madman's head, and definitely not your usual comedy.

If you don't find the film amusing then I guess it's just not for your tastes, so this is a tough one to write a review for.

For reference, some other comedies I love are The Big Lebowski, The Princess Bride, and Zoolander (that one only got me the second time around). There are others, but my taste is definitely for the unusual, and I am willing to accept that most people just don't tend to like that kind of thing. I make no apologies for having an unusual sense of humour - at least I have one.

The scenes and characters of this particular movie are well put together, the verbal humour is hilarious, the situations are intriguing, the acting is very good (as you would expect of the cast), though the acting demands made of the cast by the script are not particularly high. The overall package makes for fun, funny, watchable yet violent entertainment.

Despite the disparaging comments by other reviewers here, and the savaging this film received by mainstream critics, I've got stand by my original assessment of the piece which I made in 1996 on its release. This is a taut, sardonically funny, very well done flick, and I think it's detractor's may be missing the point a bit by pointing out that it plays like a rough draft. Were not many of the so called `Rat Pack' movies nothing more than hastily thrown together vehicles for whatever `Packer' happened to be starring? Of course it's rough around the edges! Of course it never seems to be getting its own joke! Unfortunately the joke ends up being on the film itself because it does its job too well. It looks at the genre from the coatroom, behind a row of smoke-scented overcoats. If it looks and feels like the reels were left on a smoky card table for a few weeks before being run - then it's doing its job. It's that very patina that gives Mad Dog Time it's credentials as a well done and mutli-faceted darkly funny movie that belongs not so much with it's erstwhile Rat Pack brethren as has been suggested so often, but rather with The Player and other movies whose joy, in part, is the fact that the players are so clearly having a ball making the thing. Goldblum and Dreyfuss stand out from an altogether superb cast. Goldblum for his ability to keep the audience guessing as to whether or not he really feels as confident as his character acts throughout and Dreyfuss for proving that nobody in the business can look both smugly amused and supremely confused at the same time as well as he. That's all I have to say. Now I think I'll hop home, pack my bags and leave town.

I'm quite convinced that everyone who gave this a good review watched a completely different movie than I did. With odd filming choices, bad acting, stilted dialogue and a slow plot that is so thin it barely deserves to even be called a plot, this was just a hot (or rather lukewarm) smoky mess from start to finish, dead on arrival much like many of the main players in this movie, and a one note symphony of stand off after stand off conducted sitting down for some reason (would it then be called a sit off?).

I'm going to level with you, I bought this because I have a crush on Jeff Goldblum, (hey, he has some pretty eyelashes in this movie, though his lines are limited), but even with an all star cast, it'd take a whole lot of polishing for this movie to shine. Though I will admit Gabriel Byrne's character Ben has some moments of intrigue, it can't save the whole show, and besides, most of the best scenes are already seen in the preview and so it's all downhill from there.

I mean it's certainly nowhere near the worst movie I've ever seen, it has its few small huff a tiny bit of air from your nose marginally funny moments, but it's cutting it awfully close. That lucky son of a gun who gets shot in the the first few minutes of the movie and didn't have to sit through the rest of it though, one could envy him.

This movie is an allegory. Formally, an allegory is a representation of abstract ideas by elements in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form; in this case, the screenplay, the set design, and especially the actors are the elements by which the abstract is portrayed.

If you look for cool narrative structure and are familiar with, well, the Bible, you'll probably enjoy this tongue-in-cheek view of why "heaven is such a mess."

I'll just describe the characters: have fun with the rest of the analysis.

Vic -> God

Grace ->The grace of God

Rita, Grace's sister -> Justice (akin to God's grace is God's justice, and Rita means right)

Nick Falco -> Lucifer (Old Nick is a synonym for the devil, and don't forget the imposter). His philosophy was "to hell with every God d*mn thing".

Mickey -> the archangel Michael (Nick sees him as weak)

Gabriella -> the archangel Gabriel (just hangin' out until it's time to blow the horn)

Wacky Jacky Jackson -> chaos, which seeks to dismantle God's world ("I don't give a f*ck")

Mr. Gottlieb -> When you die, you will be in the hands of Gott Lieb--God's Love-- represented by an undertaker.

Ben London -> Man (ballsy, but rather slow and full of himself)

Finally, the title itself is a play on words itself: Mad Dog Time -> God

D*mn time.

Don't be so hard on this movie until you watch it for what it really is.