Final Analysis

Final Analysis is a crackling good psychological melodrama [from a screen story by Robert Berger and Wesley Strick] in which star power and slick surfaces are used to potent advantage. Tantalizing double-crosses mount right up to the eerie final scene. Read full review

In the final analysis, the action-picture mechanics of the film are too limiting. No Mercy barely has a subject, much less a theme. Yet moments from the picture linger in the mind. If you don't leave the theater satisfied, you may at least be moved. Read full review

The most gripping performers are on the sidelines: Eric Roberts, a master of hyperbolic sliminess (he’s like Cagney playing a pimp on steroids), and Uma Thurman, who brings her underwritten role a hundred shades of curiosity, brattishness, and hopeless romantic fervor. She couldn’t be a stand-in if she tried. Read full review

Final Analysis is the kind of movie that's a lot more fun to look at than to think about. Maybe that's the point. Read full review

Final Analysis has the most convoluted plot about dreams, heights, murder, infatuation, Freudian imagery and a duplicitous San Francisco blonde since Hitchcock's "Vertigo." It's the kind of whopper that keeps you watching not because it's good but because you can't wait to see what the filmmakers will throw at you next. As it turns out, there's not much they won't try. In fact, by the time this cracked thriller reaches its hysterical finale, it's obvious that anything goes. [7 Feb 1992, p.22]

Final Analysis, an implausible psycho thriller with Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman and Richard Gere, has so many twists, turns and backward leaps, the actors tackle their work like trained poodles in a circus act. Read full review

Phil Joanou's Final Analysis is an entertaining exercise in psychological suspense up to a point. Then the ghost that has been pleasurably haunting it, that of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," turns out to be an illusion, and the real villain is revealed as that implacably clear-eyed monster, demon logic. Read full review

Final Analysis does go beyond the expected in homage to its San Francisco-based, ''Vertigo''-inspired setting. But it fails to do so in any organic way. It`s almost as if the movie were split into two parts: silly characters and tricky plot. Read full review

What is genuinely chilling about Final Analysis lies not in the foolish plotting but in the completely callous attitude of the director and writer, who are interested in their characters only as compositional elements or, at best, game pieces to be pushed around a board. It`s a cold, distant work of no compassion and, finally, no importance. Read full review

Final Analysis is a big, brooding film about desire, betrayal and psychosis that seems to have Alfred Hitchcock's fingerprints all over it. It has all the ingredients of a great thriller: a bizarre love triangle, murder, gunplay on a stormy cliff. But Hitchcock isn't in the director's chair. Phil Joanou (who made the arty State of Grace ) is, and his movie winds up as just another clumsy mystery. [13 Feb 1992, p.F1]

The last half hour is full of plot twists, turns and pretzel bends. They are imaginative, occasionally funny, and they make some surprises truly surprising. But in the process they leave the last flickering glimmer of credibility back around Minute No. 61. [8 Feb 1992, p.C06]

Final is a bad-line hoot-a-rama. Gere after aiding an Hispanic criminal: ''If Pepe is safe, then we are all safe.'' Basinger on her marriage: ''We share an apartment - emphasis on apart.'' But every joke needs a punchline. Alas, the finale of Final Analysis - the worst case of Vertigo sickness since Mel Brooks' High Anxiety - is just punch-drunk. [7 Feb 1992, p.5D]

Strick and Joanou have made this one so convoluted that interest falters, and the lack of a truly sympathetic character doesn't help. [7 Feb 1992, p.3F]

That most essential element in a thriller, the suspense, collapses mid-film, making it hard to care about the eventual denouement. Read full review

An overlong, hardly believable psychological thriller. Read full review

Watching this San Francisco-based film is a bit like looking at "Vertigo" through several heavy layers of scrim. Read full review

If you get dizzy watching Final Analysis, it may be because it's such a "Vertigo" wannabe. But director Phil Joanou is no Hitchcock, and Kim Basinger, its star, is no Kim Novak, even though Joanou poses and lights her in a critical lighthouse scene the way Hitchcock posed and lit Novak in that bell tower in "Vertigo." The big problem with "Final Analysis," though, is that Richard Gere's pivotal expert shrink is pretty easy to fool. Not until late in the film does he literally run to a library to learn about one of Freud's classic case histories. You have to suspend a ton of disbelief to buy the assumptions you have to make about him, starting with his gullibility. [7 Feb 1992, p.29]

The plot twists and turns on itself endlessly and incriminates everyone. It's as if the filmmakers are trying to incorporate all the plot details from all the classics they so obviously love. But love isn't enough either. You gotta have brains, baby, and a heart and soul would be nice. Read full review

Another day, another inept homage to "Vertigo." Read full review

Final Analysis suffers from something much worse: terminal shallowness. Read full review

The plot-turns are mounting by the minute, but they're not making a lick of sense. In fact, they're smacking of desperation, the sort of desperation that incites a writer to pull "taut" so tightly that all logic snaps, the sort that drives the movie on and on and on in search of a convincing third act and a resolving climax. [10 Feb 1992]

Final Analysis is overwrought, overwritten, overscored pseudo-Hitchcockian drivel. With more twists than Lombard Street has curves, this San Francisco-set psychological thriller is the biggest disappointment of the new year. [8 Feb 1992, p.3D]

Insanely ridiculous. Read full review