The Bonfire of the Vanities Reviews

Even though this movie had a rather lousy reputation, since I always had a weak spot for Brian De Palma’s work, I still wanted to check it out. Basically, the whole thing was some kind of really misguided book adaptation and it was at the time a major critical and commercial flop. To be honest, I have to admit that I have never read the book itself but it was a massive best-seller and many argued that it was even one of the best books released in the 80’s so there was definitely some great potential with this material. The main issue is that, since it was such a famous book, of course, the studio wanted to make some profit out of it but the problem was that the material was too dark and cynical for a mainstream feature so they tried to compromise but the end-result turned to be terribly underwhelming. Indeed, one of the most important aspect of this story was the fact that the main character was rather unlikable and they tried to tone it down with by casting one of the nicest guys in the business, Tom Hanks, who was was completely mistcast. Anyway, to conclude, even though it wasn’t really awful, it was still pretty weak and I don’t think it is really worth a look.