| Twentieth Century Fox | Release Date: April 21, 1995 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
21
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The intensity of Caruso's close-to-the-vest performance in this absorbing, brutal crime movie suggests that he may have the makings of a big-screen star. [21 Apr 1995, p.29]
With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]
It's a tough, tight, no-nonsense action melodrama filled with irresistibly hard-boiled dialogue and a large cast of engagingly hard-boiled characters. All and all, it's one of the better of the many recent Hollywood remakes of classic film noir. [21 Apr 1995]
Director Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female) has the proper foreboding drive in his technique to make every minute of his movie hum with fascinating dread. [21 Apr 1995, p.2B]
Price's script is saturated in grungy, darkly comic detail, full of left turns and double-double-crosses, and Schroeder's carefully crafted, patient pacing is refreshing—he gradually builds tension and dread, making the confrontations truly suspenseful and the outlandish action scenes more jarring and memorable.
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You feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a whole universe that's been put together with almost anthropological intricacy and feels convincing to its tiniest detail. [20 Apr 1995]
ueled by the street-wise authority of screenwriter Richard Price ("Sea of Love"), this jazzed-up remake takes a few basic cues from the '47 original, but otherwise it's a sharply updated morality play, toughened by the fact that good and evil aren't so clearly defined. [21 Apr 1995, p.H3]
If you're looking for down and dirty, Kiss of Death delivers the goods. [21 Apr 1995, p.3E]
This movie might be better-maybe even a classic-if it were less urbane, if the New York tiger that Nicolas Cage and Richard Price unleashed could bare all his fangs, and not just fill the theater with his magnetic growl. Then Kiss of Death might really be a killer. [21 Apr 1995, p.C]
Amid such a strong cast hitting all the right notes, Caruso looks wan, though he's not bad enough to sink the movie. [21 Apr 1995, p.5G]
Kiss of Death can't keep its tangled web of a plot together. The film loses momentum, it falls back on surprisingly hackneyed generic devices, and the editing gets jumpy, abrupt. In the end, the film is a lot less satisfying than its early scenes promised. [21 Apr 1995, p.10]
If you savor movies about sleazy plea bargains and other lawyer hardballing, Death has its moments. Otherwise the latest from director Barbet Shroder is only a movie of moments - much like his last: Single White Female. [21 Apr 1995, p.7D]
All Jimmy wants is for his life to return to normal. But Price and director Barbet Schroeder haven't done a very good job of letting us know who this guy is—or even what normal is to him. Schroeder also shifts back and forth between a tone of earnest homage to the mood and feel of the classic thriller to one that sends up the genre, laughing slyly behind its back.
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Although director Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female, Reversal of Fortune,
Barfly) does a workmanlike job of stirring in the grimy New York atmosphere, the picture only surges to life when Cage strides on camera. [21 Apr 1995]
With a theatrical trailer far better than the actual picture, Schroeder's film delivers little more than a healthy dose of disappointment. The picture is watchable, but nothing about it will linger, except perhaps the feeling that, with a more polished script, it might have been significantly better.
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