Romeo Is Bleeding

Wait till you get a load of this babe from hell in scenes that are sure to put the gorgeously lurid Romeo Is Bleeding on the Moral Majority’s shit list. The rest of us – those who believe it’s children and not adults who need protection from movie mayhem – will be too busy relishing the riveting fireworks display from Olin and Oldman in this scorcher of a thriller. Director Peter Medak (The Krays, The Ruling Class) keeps the action stylish, sexy and fiendishly funny. The film rarely makes a lick of sense, but it’s compulsively watchable. Read full review

But Romeo Is Bleeding ultimately belongs to Olin. When she and Oldman finally begin to go at it, no holds barred, in the last 20 minutes, the film becomes an audacious free-for-all, a bloody battle of the sexes that reaches a frantic fever pitch that will leave you giddy. It is film noir at its funniest -- and darkest. [4 Feb 1994, p.5]

Romeo Is Bleeding projects an aura of obsessive self-consciousness that occasionally suggests the superior film that eluded its creators. Read full review

Romeo Is Bleeding -- not the best title -- takes chances, and although not all of them work, the film manages the difficult trick of swinging wild while holding together. Part of the credit has to go to the consistently well-pitched acting, by Oldman and Olin and also by the actors in smaller roles, including Annabella Sciorra's quiet but edgy turn as Jack's hard-to-read wife. [4 Feb 1994, p.C3]

Romeo Is Bleeding revels in its own trashiness. It aspires to join that small circle of near-outlaw works set on the grimy edges of film noir, along with "Reservoir Dogs" and "True Romance" -- defiant champions of ultraviolence, campy outrageousness and dime-novel nihilism. Alas, it's nowhere near as good as those two, but it has a certain zany charm. [22 Apr 1994]

Mona Demarkov may not be a convincing woman, but she's an awe-inspiring embodiment of the female principle at its most devouring, Medusa, Kali, and praying mantis all rolled into one frilly, garter-wrapped package. Read full review

At its best moments, Romeo Is Bleeding actually is the wickedly funny, violent black comedy it purports to be. [4 Feb 1994, p.C2]

But they all end up spinning their wheels under Deran Sarafian, whose action-movie credentials include Jean-Claude Van Damme's "Death Warrant." He tries to establish a tongue-in-cheek attitude that seems as borrowed and clueless as Stephen Sommers' script. [4 Feb 1994, p.D28]

The blood and grunge run thick on the mean streets in Romeo Is Bleeding. This heavy dose of ultra-violent neo-noir gives Gary Oldman a face-first trip through the gutter that would make Mickey Rourke drool, but the far-fetched plotting eventually goes so far over the top that pic flirts with inventing a new genre of film noir camp. Gramercy release will find a cadre of devotees who will groove on the hot cast, high style and low-down macho fantasies, but more people will be turned off by the excessive gore and progressive facetiousness. Read full review

Romeo Is Bleeding just ends up flaunting its Grand Guignol outrageousness, rubbing our noses in its desire to be a gaudy hipster freak show. By the end, the film has become so mired in pointless sensation that it ceases to be any fun at all. Read full review

As wild as Medak wants it to be, Romeo is Bleeding isn't startling or - with the hellcat exception of Mona Demarkov - especially original. Even a fresh movie genre with an urgent title like New Violence can inspire some filmmakers to deliver the same old thing. [25 Feb 1994, p.6]

Romeo is Bleeding is an exercise in overwrought style and overwritten melodrama, and proof that a great cast cannot save a film from self-destruction. Read full review

Ms. Olin looks great, and she's a lot more fiery in this hit-woman's role than she has been when trying, in tamer films, to be nice. But otherwise, "Romeo Is Bleeding" adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Mr. Medak fared better in the service of true, wrenching stories than he does under the spell of this material's desperate fancifulness. The joke isn't much of a joke to begin with, and it wears thin. Read full review

Director Medak goes off the rails in high style with this dementedly doleful exercise in pop noir. But the film plays out the battle of the sexes at such an unflinchingly amoral pitch it really isn't funny anymore. Like Oldman's deluded operator - playing both ends and getting caught in the middle - Hilary Henkin's script isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and only Olin's breathtakingly excessive femme fatale hits the right note of campy panache. Read full review

The film certainly held me, and even fooled me in spots (when it wasn't simply confusing), but when the whole thing was over I felt pretty empty. It would be facile to say it substitutes style for content; actually, it substitutes stylishness for style. Read full review

Without Lena Olin's performance, Romeo is Bleeding could have been an ordinary, or even sub-par, film noir. However, with a villainess as fun as Mona Demarkov, it's impossible not to find some enjoyment amidst Gary Oldman's dreadful seriousness and all the bloody corpses. There are some plot twists, and a few unexpected happenings, but in the end, it's Olin's character that keeps the audience in their seats. Read full review

Romeo Is Bleeding appears to be another misfired attempt to re-create the darkly comic, genre-sendup zing of "Reservoir Dogs." The extravagant violence, luridly colorful visuals and corny hard-boiled dialogue are there. Missing is a coherent story supported by internal logic. In other words, a reason to pay attention. Other than lingerie, I mean. [4 Feb 1994, p.51]

Worse yet, Romeo Is Bleeding - which is extremely bloody - just isn't all that fun. [4 Feb 1994, p.12]

Gary Oldman and Lena Olin give energetic performances, ably supported by Annabella Sciorra and Roy Scheider as a long-suffering wife and a high-powered mobster. But the movie's main distinction is its increasingly lurid tone, reaching heights of mayhem so bizarre they're almost surrealistic. [4 Feb 1994, p.12]

Romeo Is Bleeding continues the trend of modern manifestations of the film noir. It has the basic elements: crooked cop, lethal female, vicious gang boss, tawdry locales, bloody corpses. Everything, in fact, but style. [14 Feb 1994]

ROMEO Is Bleeding is an interesting mess. A very self-conscious contemporary take on the film noir genre, it is so dark (both photographically and psychologically) and derivative that at times it seems like a parody. [2 March 1994, p.6F]

It ain't hell and it ain't heaven; it's just, more or less, another two-star movie. [4 March 1994]

A needlessly complex narrative design makes for hard-to-follow viewing, though the photography here has a satisfyingly sinister look to it. Kudos to Mark Isham for his bittersweet, jazz-inflected score, and to Oldman for his latest snapshot of a damned soul. [11 March 1994, p.L25]

But Medak never finds his groove in "Romeo." Every scene smacks of deja vu, the cynicism and irony become smothering, it's never funny or exciting enough to hold our attention, and it finally just collapses into the same pointless violence of "Gunmen" - including a scene in which a character is buried alive. [4 Feb 1994]

The author of such shoot-'em-ups as "Executioner" and "Road House," Henkin has hard-boiled the action genre twice over with this lurid, ludicrous, appallingly violent, offhandedly moralistic spoof. Read full review

Never content with one cliché when it can shovel on ten, Romeo Is Bleeding — to borrow a quote from the film's own press notes - "would be a comedy if it weren't a tragedy". Read full review

Henkin's vision of Mona Demarkov (Olin) as a remorseless, amoral, lethal, and sexually devastating (you should see what she can do with a prosthetic limb) arch-criminal is a nightmare come to life. But perhaps like dreams, the story works best when played out in the furtive dark spaces of the mind's eye. Read full review

Stylishly gruesome and dementedly romantic, "Romeo" has its pervertedly funny moments, but in the end it's a bloody bummer that leaves a depressing aftertaste. Read full review

Bad cop crosses paths with even badder hit woman in the stylistic but ultimately unsatisfying"Romeo Is Bleeding. Gary Oldman's gritty lead performance is not enough to save writer Hilary Henkin's modern-day noir fable from shooting itself in the foot. [4 Feb 1994]

The disjointed, self-conscious, over-the-top stylistics are supposed to make it seem avant-garde but mostly it's just annoying. The artsy clutter gets in the way of the crime story, which is pretty flimsy to begin with. Read full review

One of the big problems with Romeo Is Bleeding is its voiceovers. Gary Oldman, as the crooked cop protagonist, drowns in them like quicksand. [4 Feb 1994, p.54]

Romeo Is Bleeding has a core of such mean smugness that the genuine shock is that the picture got made at all. It isn't so much that the film is violent, misogynistic and hateful. It isn't even that it so often lapses into senselessness and laughable pretense. It's that a certain competence has been deployed in the service of such degrading and juvenile material, that a group of actors and filmmakers and financial backers all said ``yes'' to something that ought never to have happened. [4 Feb 1994, p.15]