I was all waiting for 'Rudy' which profiled mostly the latter years of Rudolph Guliani to be mostly a puff piece, since I have seen the (excellent) critical documentary on him, Guliani Time. But actually, I was quite pleasantly surprised at how balanced this seemed to be. While I'm some people are jumping up and down protesting that last comment, let me explain. I'm sure there are very very deep explanations about the flaws and mistakes Guliani made that were basically brushed over in this film, but really, with a 90 (??!??) minute time frame, how much info can you put in? This isn't a fluff piece, Guliani's mistakes, including his ridiculous womanizing, his almost fascist stance on crime, and his deep dark family past are all examined, and of course, that all disappeared when he was made into a National Hero because of 9/11. I mean, this is not the first time a guy with a dark history walked away a winner is it? The film itself looks amazing. I really like the mixture of video (for the 9/11 scenes) and film (for all the back story), it deftly cuts into stock footage seamlessly, and this looks quite amazing.
The only problem I have, believe it or not, is James Woods playing Rudy. Not that I don't consider him a fine actor (which of course I do) it's just that whenever I see him as Guliani, I see Roy Cohn. LOL