The Man Who Killed Don Quixote Reviews

Like many other movie buffs, I have been waiting to see this movie for almost 20 years. In fact, Terry Gilliam had even been working on this project for about 30 years. Well, I wish I could say it had been worth the wait but, unfortunately, I really struggled to care about the damned thing. Eventually, I wonder how much Gilliam has changed his script and something tells me that the original version starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis would have been much better but I’m afraid we will never know. Above all, even though there were some good ideas, the damned thing was a mess very difficult to digest. Of course, you could argue that every Gilliam movie is pretty messy but the fact that it was just way too long (about 140 mins) without really going anywhere didn’t help either. On top of that, in spite of the excessive running time, there were only a handful characters involved and, except for the main character, nobody was developed whatsoever. For example, even if Jonathan Pryce was not bad, his character was basically a one-trick poney constantly repeating that he was actually really Don Quixote which was extremely tiresome very quickly. Eventually, like some other cursed movie projects like ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ (which also managed to finally be released in 2018) or ‘Dune’ by Jodorowski (which never got made), it seems that the legends around the doomed production of this movie were more interesting than the movie itself after all. Anyway, to conclude, even if this movie was rather disappointing, it is still worth a look, especially if you are a fan of Terry Gilliam’s work.