The Bonfire of the Vanities

For all its polish, Bonfire of the Vanities neither sustains the feverish, revolutionary energy nor reaches the visceral peak of Hi, Mom! But as major Hollywood pictures go, it can become stunningly hot-tempered, a quality most journalists are too quick to ignore. Read full review

The beauty of the Wolfe book was the way it saw through its time and place, dissecting motives and reading minds. The movie sees much, but it doesn't see through. Read full review

If you loved Wolfe's book, you may very well hate the movie. If you simply liked the novel, you may be simultaneously entertained and disappointed by what De Palma and Cristofer have done to it. If you don't know the book, you may find the movie mildly enjoyable, while wondering what all the fuss is about. [21 Dec 1990, p.3]

What De Palma delivers is merely a mediocre yuppy nightmare movie, stylistically flashy but with little pace, bite or pathos. Read full review

What's off about this latest De Palma work is that the movie can't be taken seriously. The characters are straight out of a comic strip and proceed through some cartoon-like situations. And so, viewed in this way, it becomes an enjoyable romp. [17 Dec 1990]

These are the rules: When watching The Bonfire of the Vanities, you don't think of Tom Wolfe. You think of Dr. Strangelove. Only then will you embrace what little there is to like in this sprawling, seemingly racist, absurdist-revisionist twist on The Bonfire of the Vanities. [21 Dec 1990, p.20]

The Bonfire Of The Vanities gets a lot of things right but they're largely negated by the colossal things it gets wrong. Read full review

Even as they've smoothed the novel's rough edges, moreover, the filmmakers have tried to cram a maximum number of its incidents into about two hours of screen time. This gives the picture a hectic pace that adds to its feeling of weightlessness and unreality. Poor casting, especially in the major roles played by Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith, doesn't help. Read full review

A spectacular misfire from a director who should have known better. Read full review

As an evening out: Its many faults notwithstanding, Bonfire does have at least one thing going for it. The movie is a mess, but, like Wise Guys, it's a lively mess. Read full review

Our Flick of the Week is Brian De Palma's disastrous film of Tom Wolfe's seminal '80s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. And the biggest mystery of many surrounding this production is why anyone of De Palma's intelligence would want to take a great book - a truly great book - of wit and bile and soften it into platitudinous pablum? [21 Dec 1990, p.C]

The movie is going to make a lot of people mad, too - the ones who liked the book. If you missed Tom Wolfe's scathingly satirical best seller about the greedy society of the 1980s, you will probably find yourself bored by the tepid, badly miscast screen version. You may leave the theater a little confused as to why there was so much controversy during the filming of what turns out to be a silly, almost innocuous Hollywood farce. [21 Dec 1990, p.3F]

Gross, unfunny...In adapting it to the screen, Mr. De Palma and Michael Cristofer, who wrote the screenplay, have made a series of wrong decisions that have the effect of both softening the satire and making it seem more uncomfortably racist than the Wolfe original. Read full review

So what was rich, journalistic and precisely observed is now overstated, under-textured and cartooned, in playwright/screenwriter Michael Cristofer’s witless screenplay. Certainly Wolfe’s canvas might lend itself to a broad approach, but broad like “Dr. Strangelove,” not broad like the Three Stooges. Read full review

This is comic-book coverage. If the strength of the novel was the interplay between Wolfe's dry-white reportage and the sensational, tabloid-tacky humorous events he wrote about, "Vanities"-the-movie just goes for the tacky jugular. Read full review

Fans of the book will despise it, others will just find it tries too hard. If you want to see the masters of the universe chastened, see "Wall Street." This is a story of redeemed white guys. Read full review

Director Brian De Palma’s $45 million film version of the book is superficial, shopworn and cartoonish. On film, Bonfire achieves a consistency of ineptitude rare even in this era of over-inflated cinematic air bags. Read full review

One of the most indecently bad movies of the year. Read full review

It's a great-looking film with a great-looking cast, it had some of Hollywood's top talent behind the cameras, and a budget of more than $45 million, but it lacks bite and conviction and utterly failed to strike a single spark, much less catch fire. Read full review

With its general spirit of tabloid scandalmongering and frequent cutaways to an oddly enhanced Melanie Griffith in scanty panties, the point of reference seems less Victorian fiction than Victoria's Secret. Read full review

It still stinks...It's just a miss. [21 Dec 1990, p.13]

De Palma plays both sides against the middle, and eventually the thing collapses. Instead of simply pursuing what seems to be his vision of the story, about a flawed but decent man getting martyred to a corrupt system, he tries not to offend and ends up making empty and confusing gestures. When at the end of this remarkably cynical movie, Morgan Freeman, as a principled trial judge, stands up and makes a speech about decency -- ''Decency is what your grandmother taught you'' -- it's hard not to laugh out loud. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

You do get conscientious Hanks' miscast floundering (it's not pretty); Bruce Willis' lazy performance (it's beyond miscasting) as a hack journalist; showoff camera pyrotechnics; the thudding of dialogue that was hysterically funny in the book; an appallingly wrongheaded ending (even to non-readers); and the most numbingly needless and stupid off-screen narration yet. [21 Dec 1990, p.1D]

Unfortunately, the caricatures are so crude and the ‘revelations’ so unenlightening of the human condition, that the satire is about as socially incisive as a Police Academy entry. Read full review

It seems almost impossible that someone could vulgarize and coarsen Tom Wolfe's best-selling novel, but leave it to director Brian De Palma, working here with a script by Michael Cristofer, to plumb uncharted depths. Read full review

Like Sherman McCoy, the hero of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Brian De Palma makes one fatal choice that leads to disaster. The disaster is the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities. The choice was De Palma's decision to film it as a cartoon -- a broad, black, wannabe savage comedy. Every unfortunate moment of this screechy, heavy-handed movie is a result of that basic misconception, compounded by the fact that the comedy is staged by a man who seems to have temporarily lost his sense of humor. [24 Dec 1990, p.63A]

Up in smoke, down in flames, reduced to ashes - choose your disaster metaphor for Bonfire of the Vanities. As filmed by Brian De Palma, it's "Misfire of the Vanities," the most wrongly conceived of the many popular novels brought to the screen this year. [21 Dec 1990, p.49]