Bringing Out The Dead (1999)
a review by Evan Landon
I've talked at nauseam about movies that I dislike and maybe should have not been made (to which, by the way, there are so many that it's just smashing low hanging fruit), but that becomes so irritable that I wonder why I even bother reviewing anything. The drab discourse of cinematic failures are so rampant these days that my brain becomes numb after I think about how much money a studio spent on such tepid, high demand, ostentatious droves of pandering to the modern audiences that the entire plot of a movie gets lost on me. That's not a good thing. The love of a great cinematic piece is almost the heart and soul of our very nature to understand meaning in ourselves, our friends, our families, even our livelihoods.
That brings me neatly to the point of the very film I am speaking of, Bringing Out The Dead, a wonderfully shot and crafted little film by a certain Martin Scorsese that could be considered his biggest bomb of all time. How many great films can one man do to where a movie like this one bombs? Goes to show you that not every pitch you are thrown when you come up to bat will be a home run. The endearing part about this one might just be the fact that it wasn't a hit. We put so much emphasis on how much a movie makes for it to be considered “good” when some of the most enjoyable movies are ones that gain a following afterwards. I wouldn't go so far as to say that is what this one is, but I would definitely put it up for consideration as a next cult classic.
The plot is a relatively simple one: a paramedic named Frank (played by the ghostly visage of one Nicolas Cage) is so strung out from bringing in every sort of patient in Manhattan that he sees the ghost of the first of many botched resuscitations, Rose, and descends into madness from insomnia, depression, uppers, downers, and a host of partners that will drive him to the next stop which could just be his last glimmer of sanity. Simple, right? Hehehe...
The greatest part of such a story like this is how each actor paints this mosaic with their own tools: John Goodman is his first partner who are called to a cardiac arrest patient whom Frank finds a strange infatuation with his daughter played by Patricia Arquette named Mary, Ving Rhames who plays a very religious yet equally off-kilter paramedic who drinks on the job, and Tom Sizemore in probably my favorite role he ever played as the one partner nobody wants to ride with. There are also a slew of actors that elevate this film, but no one as much as Cliff Curtis who plays a drug dealer that Mary depends upon. I had to mention that because he really stands out.
With a kicking soundtrack and lighting to accompany this drug-induced take on the Joe Connelly novel of the same name, you can almost feel the exhaustion and defeat from Nicolas Cage in only a way that he can. Throw Martin Scorsese in there and you have a movie, my friend. It just seems a little incoherent at times, but again, maybe that is its endearing quality.
At a budget of $32 million and only pulling in $16.8 million, it just goes to show that movies are not always a success on name recognition alone, but that does not make it a bad movie.
3.5 out of 5