This movie is SO underrated

Looking at the other messages here, I'm beginning to see a trend: People who read and loved the book by Tom Wolfe really dislike the movie. People who see the movie with no preconceptions feel free to like the movie on its own merits.

It's too late for me. I'd read the book. Twice, once in an empty highschool surrounded by a raging snowstorm in bush Alaska. For me there is no question but that the movie failed on a massive scale to capture any of the book's tone, message, and huge amount of irony.

The movie was so bad that there is a creditable book about the making of the movie: "The Devil's Candy" by Julie Salamon. It goes into interesting detail about DePalma's thinking, the casting, the dreadful changes made in character development and actions due to casting and "PC" concerns.

Basically, Wolfe's book was a sharp satire on American, more particurly urban, politics and values. It made major ethnic observations, most notably the power of people such as Al Sharpton gaining power by racial blackmail, but also a critique of the values of the legal profession, where the prospect of a white defendant makes city prosecutors drool.

For whatever reason, Tom Hanks, an excellent actor, was miscast here. I think he carried too much of the 'everyman' with himself, he didn't come off as being a supercilious preppie stockbroker at the outset. Ms. Cattrall may have been okay but she was a bit high strung I thought. Melanie Griffith, who I like as an actress, was totally miscast as the mistress with a southern accent (which she performed atrociously). I didn't buy Alan King as her plutocrat husband. No gravitas. Morgan Freeman was inserted as a PC fit. He in fact had the only gravitas I remember from the movie, but it didn't belong there.

Nevertheless I bought the movie! It was on sale of course. I noticed that my copy of it did not have any extras whatsoever. Unless there is a better version, it's a sign that the studio felt it was a bomb, and most likely the director, too. He should have had a voice over going "I'm really really sorry! I don't know what I was thinking", or better yet "This is what I was thinking and this is where I fouled up." I bought the movie to remind myself how bad a movie can be even when the book is good. There is also a scene where the Concorde lands in New York right in front of the Moon. The assistant director spent a lot of time setting that up, as attested to in "The Devil's Candy."

Bruce Willis was horribly miscast, because the idea was that the tabloids were British owned and this reporter was a drunken Brit who yet retained a sense of reality, well below the surface. The character was well developed by Wolfe and could have been played to perfection by someone like Jeremy Irons or possibly Geoffrey Rush.

So I'm fascinated that there are people who loved the picture, but it's one of the worst all time adaptations done by very capable people and a warning to all.

And it's worth seeing, by people who love film, just because of everything I just wrote.