The Deal Reviews

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a pretty cool cast, I thought I might as well give it a try. First of all, it was very nice to have once again William H. Macy playing the lead and he delivered a decent performance but, to be honest, he didn’t do such a good job as writer on this feature. Indeed, half of it was pretty good but the other half seriously went nowhere. Let’s start with the good stuff. The whole little world behind the scenes making those widely different movies was really intriguing and remembered me of my days when I was a production assisant at the NFTA (Dutch film school). Indeed, it shows how relentless and fully absorbing movie making can be. Personally, I really had a hard time to connect with this world and the people involved in it who were completely caught up in the movie making process, a process which I found rather thankless and tiresome (as you might guess I didn’t pursue a career in this direction). Unfortunately, the rest was not really good, I’m afraid. Take the main character. Apparently, he didn’t produce a movie for a decade but, completely out of the blue, he manages to start up the production on a massive blockbuster with a seemingly huge budget and, constantly, he keeps making some bizarre decisions and for no apparent reasons, the Hollywood executives keep giving their blessings. It didn’t really add up with the loser suicidal producer who couldn’t get anymore job. The other thing that really bothered me was his obsession with Meg Ryan’s character and the way their relationship was developed. It was rather distracting and even though it got better towards the end, the damage was already done. To conclude, it is a movie with some good ideas but the execution was really deeply flawed so I don’t think it is really worth a look.