User reviews

Bonfire of the vanities. A movie that has the reputation of being awful. I didn't think so. I saw it a long time ago but liked it. I have heard so much about how bad this movie was and never understood why. It isn't the best movie definitely not but there are so many BAD movies-this movie had a message (a pretty sad one) and the story was Involving. My attention was captured. I wanted to see what would happen next.

This movie is so true to life. There ARE people out there whose actions would be worse then some in this movie. People whose lives are motivated by greed. (The worst bad movie out there that I've seen that tells the story of truly horrendous people motivated by greed and power is "in the company of men". Much more unpleasant then this movie.) This movie, I GUESS is controversial, not considered as good as the book and maybe it was ahead of its time. I think it's worth seeing though and would give it a 7.

The back cover for the DVD calls this movie "hilarious" and "the quintessential story of the go-for-it '80s." In truth, it is neither. The Bonfire of the Vanities is, however, funny in parts, poignant in parts, and entertaining throughout.

The protagonist is Sherman McCoy, a man whose one fatal flaw (an affair we know of from the beginning) leads to the downfall from his envious position as a "Master of the Universe." Tom Hanks gives an excellent performance and shows real emotion in bringing this highly plausible character to life. Unfortunately, his character is the only one with enough depth to be realistic. Even Morgan Freeman's Judge White, representing a refreshing dose of intelligence and honesty in the film, is perhaps too good to be believed. All of the other characters are mere caricatures, appearing too greedy, too pretentious, too self-absorbed, or too flighty to be believed. Bruce Willis might have made himself an exception as well, but I feel he simply lacked enough screen time to flesh out the different faces he had to show.

Nevertheless the story is very well told. If the other characters appear less than convincing, accept them as colorful background for McCoy, who is the real focus anyway. There are numerous laughs, and the other characters represent elements that are definitely present in society - even if not to the extent shown here. Wolfe's story is entertaining enough to make this movie worth seeing. And it might even make you think twice about the names you see next time you open a newspaper.

7 / 10 stars.

Profound exploration of the anatomy and course of a greedy, ambitious and self-centered life, in its various forms (through several characters with unique forms of greed and ambition and lust). Various people get their just dues in humorous, often unexpected ways. Really satisfying and clever movie.

Before I talk about the movie itself, I'd like to get ugly for a quick sec..

I am sick and tired of people whining that a movie isn't as good as a book. First of all, we all already know that 99% of the time a book is not equally rendered in film. How can it? The physiological experience of reading is totally different from that of taking in audio-video. Hello? A book often can't fit into a 90 minute movie anyway, and we all complain when a director tries to stretch our minute-rice attention span more than 2 hours, which would allow the space to capture more of the subtle nuances that we love in a book.

If you want to read the book, do us all a favour, don't watch a movie, go read the #@%$ book. Does anyone think that a painting could represent each facet of a poem? They are two separate and distinct mediums. Sheesh.

Now, book aside, this movie is trying to talk about an issue. And it does so quite fine. If you need the book to get the message, that's your business.

Each character was a caricature, a spoof, hyperbolized to help drive home the message that truth is often irrelevant to the socio-political motives behind people's actions. From the "assistant DA" looking for recognition to the "hymie racist" angling for the office of mayor to the "good reverend" looking for sympathy for his people (and a payday) to Fallow trying to save his career to McCoy's lawyer who has to patiently deal with his naive client who doesn't grasp that his life is insignificant to all those who somehow have generated a vested interest in his demise...

I got the message, it didn't take me the 6 hours or two days (or however long it would take me to make time to read the book), and I had some fun.

It's been a long time since I read the book or saw the movie, but the casting in this film was all wrong. I saw the trailer on TV, saw the disaster the film might be, but I went to see it anyways and I was very disappointed. Tom Hanks, even before Philadelphia or Forrest Gump or Sleepless in Seattle, played the likable every-man. Hanks' character, Sherman McCoy, is a wall street tycoon, aged 38, with a wife two years older, a daughter he adores, and a young mistress that he insists he deserves all because he is a "master of the universe". In the book, Judy McCoy, Sherman's wife, is described as handsome but matronly at aged 40. Sherman remembers his mother telling him a wife two years older would not make a difference when he was 24 and she was 26, but 20 years later it would, and actually it took only ten years.

But then one night when he is with his mistress, Sherman takes a wrong turn off the freeway into the South Bronx and ends up hitting a black youth with his car because he perceives his life is in danger, and decides to not report the accident to police, to "hit and run". However, he is tracked down and arrested and soon realizes he is not the master of anything compared to the grifters, community leaders, ambulance chasers, and prosecutors who finally have a completely unlikable rich white perp and a poor black victim.

The novel was wonderful and nuanced. The movie is obvious and almost farcical. Hanks is too likable to play any of the characters in this film, I had Bruce Willis pictured as Sherman McCoy more than the drunken yellow journalist, and Kim Cattrell, who plays Sherman's wife, doesn't look like the matronly 40 year old and barely tolerated wife of anybody in 1990. Only Morgan Freeman as the judge rings remotely true. I'd pass on this one if I were you, but for sure read the book. After the 2008 crash and the banksters walking away without a scratch, Sherman McCoy seems more real than ever.

I'll never know why this was a critical failure. Maybe because it makes New York City look like a corrupt sewer? Hey, if the shoe fits . . . I guess viewers stayed away because of bad reviews. I think the ridiculous title may have had a lot to do with it too. Some of it strained credulity - he could have driven right over that tire - but then there would be no movie. I didn't understand the critical hatred years ago on my initial viewing, and I don't understand it now after re-watching twenty years later.

Tom Wolfe's sprawling novel about the aftershocks of a hit-and-run in 1980's New York set out to capture the corruption and self- promotion that seemed to dominate the decade, with every power player in the city, and every hanger-on trying to achieve personal triumph, latching on to the media and cultural frenzy to benefit their own personal agenda. It's a remarkable novel; bleakly hilarious but meticulously detailed. A movie adaptation was always going to be dangerous territory, and Brian De Palma's resulting film, that flopped both critically and commercially, is a confused mess. The complete failure of the film may be somewhat cruel and not wholly deserved, but De Palma goes for all-out comedy, failing to grasp Wolfe's subtle satire completely.

Tom Hanks plays self-styled 'master of the universe' Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street broker who enjoys every material comfort that life can offer, living in his huge apartment with his ditsy wife Judy (Kim Cattrall). During an eventful night with his mistress Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith), they take a wrong turn while heading back to her apartment and end up in South Bronx. Sherman gets out of the car to clear the road when he is approach by two black youths, and a misunderstanding leads to Ruskin accidentally running one of them over. They flee the scene, but once the story of a rich white man almost killing a poor black kid breaks, the likes of Reverend Bacon (John Hancock), a Harlem religious and political leader, Jewish district attorney Abe Weiss (F. Murray Abraham) and hard-drinking journalist Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) rear their heads to twist the ongoing s**t-storm to their own benefit.

Despite some nice tracking shots and sets that really do capture the tacky glamour of the 80's, the movie's biggest downfall is the casting. The two leads, Hanks and Willis, are woefully miscast. McCoy is a loathsome character, a WASP-ish high-roller in an increasingly capitalist country, but Hanks is one of the most likable actors around. He looks visibly uncomfortable in a thinly- written role, and only takes control of his character in a scene in which he clears his apartment by unloading a shotgun played mainly for laughs, which at this stage of his career was Hanks's shtick. Fallow in the novel is a manipulative con-man, twisting the unravelling story through his newspaper in order to keep his job and make a nice paycheck along the way. But De Palma only seems to have picked up on his heavy drinking, meaning that Willis swings a bottle around and narrates the story, playing the role of spoon-feeder without playing an active role in story or convincing as someone who could get to his position.

But then again, De Palma's movie doesn't exist in the real world. Arguably, the ensemble of characters in Wolfe's novel were caricatures, but they were well-rounded characters, and being inside their heads meant that we could understand their motives, something the movie entirely ignores. So we get the likes of Bacon, Weiss, lawyer Tom Killian (Kevin Dunn) and Assistant District Attorney Kramer (Saul Rubinek), all key players in the novel, reduced to scowling or bumbling onlookers, while McCoy squirms for our amusement and Fallow tells us what we're supposed to be thinking. Occasionally its an all-out pantomime, which would be forgivable it was funny or insightful. Yet when Wolfe calls for pantomime at the climax, the movie delivers a ridiculous speech spoken by Judge White (Morgan Freeman), informing us that decency is what your grandmother taught you.

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The first 2 thirds of this were really quite watchable and successful in my view. Only the last 3rd starts to go a bit wrong - as the actors seems unsure how to top what they have already done and you see them lose confidence or start to imitate their earlier performances with fixed/glazed expressions. The final courtroom speech by Morgan Freeman also seems contrived and insincere. That said, everything else seemed spot on to me, I liked the almost cartoonish approach to the characterisation - Seinfeld did the same a lot of the time and was praised - and I liked the locations, costumes, camera movements etc. Tom Hanks is very good here in my view, more likable than when he plays the all-American good guy. Perhaps more could have been done with the Bruce Willis character - show his vanity and nastiness some more as in the book. But, like many reviewers here, not sure why this movie was so despised at the time.

Brian De Palma's over-hyped, over-expensive, would-be blockbuster was one of the more notorious flops of the decade: a fifty million dollar write-off all but ignored by the movie-going public, and for good reason. The novel by Tom Wolfe may have been a blistering social satire highlighting everything wrong with the Reagan 1980s: political corruption, corporate greed, media distortion, self-serving publicity, and so forth. But on the big screen it only served to illustrate everything wrong with modern American movie-making: executive interference, artistic compromise, and the fatal miscasting of bankable stars in inappropriate roles. Asking nice guy Tom Hanks to portray an arrogant, insensitive Wall Street yuppie ruined by a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx was a bad enough decision, but rewriting characters just to accommodate Bruce Willis (a jaded English journalist?) and Morgan Freeman (a fiery Jewish judge?) renders most of Wolfe's intended satire meaningless. The film died a quiet death at the box office, but it at least succeeded as a textbook Hollywood literary adaptation: dumbing down a controversial bestseller to make it more accessible to semi-literate filmgoers.

However you may feel about the plot, acting, actors, directing, screenplay v. Book, this movie is still relevant in 2021 (minus the little trinket called social media).

Bonfires of the Vanities is a film drenched in flop sweat. I can recall no film that has tried so hard to be so unrelentingly outrageous, provocative and important, yet failed so consistently across the board. It is like a stand up comic who's not getting laughs, but can't leave the stage. The harder the film tries, the louder each attempt at a laugh results in a resounding thud. The desperation the film displays is so glaring it almost rouses pity for all those involved.

The film achieves laugh-out-loud status only twice. Once is in the sight of Geraldo Rivera playing an obnoxious, arrogant and amoral TV tabloid journalist -- which is funny only because he apparently doesn't realize he is playing himself. The other scene that deserves to be laughed at is the film's final "big moment," wherein the judge played by Morgan Freeman delivers the sanctimonious lecture about what morality is ("it's what your mama taught ya!"). The pomposity of the moment is insulting to the point of being absurd.

Yet, one must admit it is a noble effort. It does have a good, if poorly cast, band of actors, who try to make characters out of cardboard thin caricatures. The film looks professionally made and the little cinematic flourishes that director Brian DePalma just loves are apparent, if not particularly effective. But the film, which apparently wishes to be a commentary on modern morals and ethics, never arises above the level of cartoon. Satire requires style. Farce requires energy. Even sitcom requires timing. But the best Bonfires can muster is desperation. In the end, you don't want to laugh, you just want to turn away.

After reading a large number of negative reviews, it finally became clear to me why this movie is so widely hated - because it honestly depicts the modern biased race-based American society, in which uneducated crowds are ready to devour an honest person, and punish him for a crime he didn't commit. The acting is great, Tom Hanks does an admirable job, however,it isn't acting which makes the movie great. The superb directing, creating realistic and horrible scenes of dirty political games and black (literally) PR, capture my attention. So, to sum up, a brilliant political satire. The movie could make a laughable comedy, if it wasn't so terrifying...

It has been 28 years between viewings for me on this film. Now I was a fan of the book and hated the changes the filmmakers did but after recently reading the book on the making of this film (The Devil's Candy) I decided to view this film once again and I was surprised how much I enjoyed the film.

Now this is not a masterpiece but the film does tell the story about how "Greed" does corrupt and and how many different types of"Greed" there is. Everybody wants something from someone. The film does however alter the "Sherman" character a tad too much but at the end of the day the film works.

I hope critics will re-evaluate their opinions of this film. Since its release the film seems to have been ahead of the curb on many issues!

I finally saw this, having read the book and put off watching the movie. I should have kept putting it off. It honestly is one of the worst movies I have ever seen, in every sense of the word, in all departments. A rare achievement for a film. Both Tom and Bruce are woefully miscast and if there was a motivation in any of the characters, I am still digging for it. All the depth of the novel completely vanished from sight. Did anybody even remotely associated with the film READ the book??? I suspect Melanie Griffith might have come close, her character's greed, dishonesty and avarice shines through. Morgan Freeman (and I am a long time admirer) overacts to the point of nausea. Hanks is far too nice for the part of Sherman. He just about sinks under the weight of the part. I mean nice Tommy as a "master of the universe?" A brutal bond trader? I kept watching, I had no hope it would improve, it was akin to watching an accident at the side of the road. You want to drive away, you can't. You can't define what's keeping you there, the gore, the smashed and broken bodies, the pitiful moaning? 3 out of 10 for this absolute mess of a flick.

I loved this film; rented it and watched it twice in 2 days. I was captivated by the titles (a 24-hour timelapse shot of the New York skyline taken from the top of the Chrysler Building!) and then by the first scene: Bruce Willis's drunken peregrination with sycophantic handlers through the bowels of a hotel, leaving chaos in his wake. It may not have improved from that point, but I never lost interest. What did I miss that led so many people to dislike the film?

The point of Wolfe's original novel -- indeed the point of the whole story -- is that things take place because of a carefully calculated sense of expediency. The goal is survival within a particular kind of life style. The novel is full of malice. The only relationship that rings emotionally true is that between Sherman and his daughter, Campbell, and that's only touched upon. That aside, everyone is out for what he can get in the way of publicity, power, money or self aggrandizement.

Wolfe was criticized for hitting every character and every social segment of New York City over the head. His response was a denial. After all, he lived in New York himself and belonged to a neighborhood improvement committee and other admirable organizations, exactly the qualifications one would want on his resume in order to deny that he disliked New Yorkers. (Wolfe has a PhD in American Studies from Yale and is no dummy.) Those supposed weaknesses are what made the novel memorable. Nobody was any good. And Sherman McCoy wound up broke, a professional protester for social justice. The movie throws all of that away and imposes a moral frame on the story that simply doesn't fit. Wolfe did his homework. The novel was rooted in reality. Every event was not only possible but thoroughly believable. Wolfe might have made a great cultural anthropologist -- he knows how to get inside a system and record its details.

Yes, any of us might have found ourselves, as Sherman and his mistress do, stuck in the South Bronx, threatened by a couple of black kids, and making a getaway after bumping into one of them. That scene is transferred neatly from print to celluloid.

But after that scene the movie seems not to trust its audience and at times become frantic in its attempt to spell out its message, however nebulous the message is.

Sherman might accidentally hit some kid and be arrested for it as he is in the novel, but he would not immediately upon his release from jail go back to his phenomenally expensive condo, take out a shotgun, and start shooting into the ceiling with it, as he does in the movee. In what's supposed to be a funny scene, ceiling plaster falls all over the party guests and they scurry away, shrieking. It simply would not have happened. The movie has left the novel's unspeakably detailed reality in the dust. Wolfe's sensibility, the work he put into capturing the real, has been lost. What we get instead is a noisy, fantastic, and silly scene that doesn't do anything except wake the audience up. Similar empty scenes follow, screaming out for Wolfe's verisimilitude.

The movie also fails because it thrusts a lot of sin and redemption into an entertaining story of moral nihilism. Here we see "Don Juan in Hell" at the opera. We get lectures on redemption from a poet with AIDs. We see a lot of guilt in Sherman. A black judge who preaches from the bench and gives one of those final speeches about how we all have to start behaving nicely again. A reporter who feels sorry for Sherman after turning him into a sacrificial lamb. And a happy ending in which Sherman gets off by breaking the law with an idiotic grin. The scene sits on the movie like a jester's cap on a circus elephant's head.

The movie not only makes points that are already trite and unoriginal, it overstates them, as if the audience were incapable of absorbing any subtleties.

It's not the acting or the direction that's poor. The film's not bad in those respects. And the photography is pretty good too, including two rather spectacular shots -- the gargoyles of the Chrysler building and the landing of the Concorde. It's the script that is thoroughly botched.

The first half of the movie, roughly, is okay in conception and execution. It keeps some of the little details from the novel. Sherman and Judy's dog is named Marshall. Who the hell would name a dog Marshall? It loses its focus almost completely in the second half and on the whole is barely worth watching.

Wolfe's cynical redneck right-wingism may be offensive to a lot of people, but he's got the cojones to lay his percepts out. Alas the writers and producers did not have the courage to pick them up and thus blew the chance to make a fascinating study of New Yorkers.

I knew nothing of this film before watching it; I had never read the book and did not even know what it was about, other than the fact that it was directed by Brian De Palma, had a talented cast, and was considered one of the biggest box office flops and critical failures of its time.

If these facts are all you know about the film, you will most likely wonder what the hate is about. By Hollywood standards it isn't that bad: there's an interesting story, entertainingly exaggerated camera work, decent cinematography. It is, however, very politically incorrect, showcasing how the death of a black man becomes a media circus stirred up by politicians and reporters who all have something to gain.

But it's no 'Ace in the Hole', being played as a comedy instead; imagine George Floyd's death as a looney satire and that's basically what this is. The humor has the loud broadness which usually crops up when pretentious directors try to be funny, but it's at least somewhat elevated by the cast and the (let's face it) fearlessness of the material, which has barely aged a day. (The rather gutsy Al Sharpton parody, now I certainly didn't expect to see that...).

Obviously, all this rubbed a lot of critics the wrong way, even though the film is generally not as tasteless than the stuff they normally advocate. A book could definitely do the story better, though. The character weave is muddled, not as fleshed out as it could be. Bruce Willis has a snide narration full of the kind of artsy-quippy dialogue that you can tell was just ripped from some acclaimed source novel. (The overall effect is quite reminiscent of Noah Baumbach's recent 'White Noise', and indeed the film itself kind of is.)

But the main weakness of the film, as with so many other De Palma joints, is that he seems unsure of what to say, and so uses flashy camerawork to give the feeling of a profundity that isn't there. A prime example of this is when Hank's Sherman McCoy attends the opera Don Giovanni. Meanwhile De Palma, utilizing his visual style, rather aggressively correlates Giovanni and McCoy. But why? McCoy is a bit of an unscrupulous jerk (though he comes off as better than almost every other character in the film), but De Palma never pronounces any moral judgement over him, treating even his infidelity lightly, as something to be expected. What option for 'repentance' even is there? By the climax of the movie the director is sending off mixed signals in all directions, seemingly endorsing dishonesty while having Morgan Freeman's no-nonsense judge character rattle off some speech about the importance of decency. What? There isn't even anything ironic about all this.

Self-absorbed, ridiculously carried-away trash that thinks it's way more edgy and pertinent than it actually is. An adaptation of a popular novel, it's clearly the victim of a studio mandate to swing hard, if not particularly accurately. It's loaded with starpower, with Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith and Morgan Freeman sharing the spotlight, but none can help their sailing astronomically over the top with the material. Each character is more selfish and despicable than the last, even Freeman's grandstanding judge and Hanks's over-his-head bond trader on trial as political fodder. Lofty hunks of social commentary are swung around with all the subtlety of a war hammer, belaboring the point until we all lay bruised, bloodied and beaten on the floor. Potentially-pointed stereotypes get played like aces, but fail to register as more than a long series of cartoon characters with a big vocabulary. It's confused, sneering and wretched; no surprise it could only attract flies at the box office.

This movie should of been made as a TV-Mini series (Like for HBO). This movie is one of the biggest bombs of all time. (Even on its release Heaven's Gate was still a bigger bomb). The book was raped by the people who adapted it. They didn't understand the book and the movie of course suffers from that.

Mr Depalma is a heavy handed director and it show all to well in this film! Their is moments of a few moments of greatness but moments do not make a movie. The cast is good but the Bruce Willis part was written as an English Journalist in the book.

I think there is a great movie that can come from "Bonfire of the Vanities" Maybe one day we will get one. I think David Mament would wonders adapting and directing a remake of this. I wouldn't change the setting I will still have take place in New York in the 1980's.

Maybe even Danny Boyle could also be a wise choice as a director.

Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a big time Wall Street trader and considers himself one of the Masters of the Universe. His wife Judy (Kim Cattrall) is angry with his cheating. He goes to pick up his mistress Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) from JFK airport. They get lost in the Bronx. They get frightened by two black men and Maria drives over one of them. Drunken reporter Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) writes up the hit-and-run. D.A. Abe Weiss (F. Murray Abraham) is facing re-election and needs a white man to convict. Judge Leonard White (Morgan Freeman) sees through it all. Jed Kramer (Saul Rubinek) is the assistant D.A. Reverend Bacon (John Hancock) is agitating.

Tom Hanks is wrong. He's a boy scout. He's the every man. He's no Wall Street man. He's not Charlie Sheen and he's definitely not Michael Douglas. The movie works too hard to make him the good guy and it doesn't feel right. Brian De Palma does a lot of interesting camera moves. The start is an impressive tracking shot. There are the umbrellas. The sets and locations look terrific but it also feels fake. This should be grittier, darker and harder. Every character is a caricature. Lastly, the two black guys need to be more definitive. They should be bringing out their guns to rob them or be two younger kids looking to help them. It would make whatever the movie is trying to do that much sharper. With the central character being so wrong, it's hard to make this movie right.

I don't understand the hate for this movie. While I agree Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis were miscast I still enjoyed the movie. Smdh.

I've never read the source novel for "Bonfire of the Vanities", so I can't view the film version in an adaptation context. But I can look at this as a movie that features a laundry list of capable actors and a skilled director and ask, "What the hell is this?" All this talent wasted on something so meandering, on-the-nose and comically unfunny? Sherman McCoy is supposed to be an unlikable character, and they go out and cast Tom Hanks? And Melanie Griffith over Uma Thurman? Honestly, this thing was doomed from the first step.

On the plus side, Morgan Freeman steals the entire thing (although his percentage of screen time is woefully lacking). And F. Murray Abraham does have the one funny line. That's right, one. The satirical wit herein isn't rapier, but more plastic spoon, and it just makes the whole movie a grind. Some of the worst pacing I've seen in a while.

If you do decide to suffer through this wretchedness, immediately go out and read Julie Salamon's "The Devil's Candy", which is one of the most scintillating behind-the-scenes books out there.

Unbelievably more rewarding than the movie.

3/10

Don't waste your time. It's superficial, badly written and fails miserably in capturing the spirit of the novel.