| Columbia Pictures | Release Date: February 16, 1990 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
5
Mixed:
7
Negative:
11
|
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Critic Reviews
Since the men are Anthony Quinn and Kevin Costner and their mutual love is a stunning newcomer, Madeleine Stowe, the film rises above formula. [13 Feb 1990]
Revenge is quite entertaining in its countdown to the first quivering coupling between Costner and Stowe. He trembles; her nostrils flair. But once they`ve made it, the film turns ugly as Costner foolishly seeks a vacation idyll with her in his small Mexican vacation home. The beatings that follow are plentiful enough to leave no one unscarred.
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Scott manages the shift from tremulous romance to violent retribution very well, but his efficient handling of some surprisingly tough action scenes is compromised by a surfeit of pop promo clichés: billowing net curtains, clouds of fluttering doves, an excessive use of coloured filters.
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Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]
Revenge is like a movie about two idiots who jump off a cliff hoping gravity will take a holiday. When they hit the ground _ well, that's just too bad. [16 Feb 1990, p.E1]
Hardly anyone comes off looking good in this glitzy and faintly ludicrous melodrama. [16 Feb 1990, p.34]
If Costner's clout gets this 124-minute snooze even three weeks of business, dust off the Tom Cruise Cocktail award. [16 Feb 1990, p.4D]
A flaccid movie version of Jim Harrison's slightly less flaccid 1979 novella...The movie is soft and aimless. Revenge is the kind of film in which subsidiary characters and events are more interesting than anything the movie is supposed to be about. Even the brutality has no shock effect.
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Inflated to more than two hours, spiced up with lyrical pseudeo-erotic sex scenes, Scott's Revenge is long on candlelight and billowing white curtains and short on emotional potency. [26 Feb 1990, p.66]
As expected, Kevin Costner is witty and personable in Revenge. The movie isn't nearly as charming. It overstays its welcome with a story that's not gripping enough to fill half its two-hour running time. [21 Feb 1990, p.D4]
A brutal and brutally stupid thriller about brutal and brutally stupid people,[16 Feb 1990]
Tony Scott's Revenge is fascinating for one reason only -- as an example of full-scale, mega-star perversity. The star, in this case, is Kevin Costner, and there's a willfulness in the extremes to which he's gone here to alienate his public. Costner pitches his performance at his audience like a dare, as if he were seeing how far out on a limb it's willing to climb with him.
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Revenge, adapted from Harrison's novella, is the sickest of male bonding movies. It is about friendship and betrayal, and how men must uphold their dignity at the expense of all else. Particularly women. [17 Feb 1990, p.1D]
The screenplay, by Jim Harrison and Jeffrey Fiskin, from Harrison's novella, might have made a good B movie, but Scott refused to let that happen. He was out to make another A movie, and made an F movie that also is excessively and unnecessarily violent. [19 Feb 1990, p.5D]
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