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Johnny Handsome
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by Live / Artisan
Sales Rank: 6751
Price: $9.98
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This is a great movie that deserves a better DVD release - audio/video remastered and, please, PLEASE! Get it right and make it widescreen this time around.
Viewer Reviews
Walter Hill's 1989 morality play sees Mickey Rourke gives one of his very best performances as a deformed crook given plastic surgery and a second chance for either redemption or revenge. Given short shrift from most critics and making little impact at the box-office, Johnny Handsome is a minor classic waiting to be discovered, a pulp noir thriller in the RKO mold lifted into another class by the conviction of the cast and direction.
Hill's direction is a refreshing return to the form he hadn't quite managed to hit since The Driver, with a title sequence reminiscent of The Warriors briskly setting both the scene and the pace and acting as a prelude to the fluid, fast-cut action scenes. Originally developed for Robert De Niro, Rourke lends considerable depth to the part, making interesting use of his voice in the early scenes, Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen make a convincingly sleazy pair of villains, Freeman walks away with everybody else's scenes and, as usual, Elizabeth McGovern does her best with an almost non-existant role. Only the normally reliable Whittaker stumbles with his role, serving the narrative demands of his part without ever really getting inside it, but that's a small price to pay for a thriller as good as this.
Unfortunately LionsGate's DVD is a shoddy fullframe transfer, so those with multi-region players might want to pick up the PAL Region 2 DVD instead, which boasts a decent 1.8:1 transfer and the original trailer.
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Johnny Handsome
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