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Out of Sight: Collector's Edition Customer Reviews (22 - 24 of 34 Reviews)

Outta Sight!
I love this movie. One of the few films of a Elmore Leonard novel that captures his off-center, ironic, quirky humor and style. A typical genre-buster, it is a prison/caper/crime movie that is really a love story that is more of a comedy that is really a character study.

Steven Soderbergh brings intelligence and just the right understanding of the material to bring off this oddball romance. And, he is helped enormously by a perfectly cast ensemble of players who make it all work nicely. Up front is George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez who generate some real on screen chemistry and heat and are a wonderful match. There isn't a missed note in the supporting cast of Don Cheadle, Ving Rhames, Steve Zahn, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks and (unbilled) a nice cameo by Michael Keaton and also Samuel L. Jackson.

A bank robber escaping prison (Clooney) briefly captures a Federal Marshal (Lopez) who accidently interrupts the escape, and while riding in the trunk of the escape car with her, their respective masks drop briefly and they make a human connection. Neither can get the other out of his/her mind and their lives are destined to become intertwined.

That this simple premise of the accidents of fate and the fateful attraction of opposites works so well is a combination of great material to begin with (thanks Elmore Leonard), perfectly realized in all the details (thanks Steven Soderbergh and Frank Scott). His color schemes in the film show that Traffic was no accident. Nice touches with the music too!

George Clooney really stepped into Leading Man shoes with this one, and Jennifer Lopez (pre JayLo) is fine, and I do mean fine!

There is some nice extras and the Making Of documentary has Soderbergh actually telling us something about how he visualized and shot the movie, as well as the added treat of observations by Elmore Leonard and humorous comments from the cast.

A sexy romance with some graphic violence and loads of humor this is a unique and original piece of work. So glad that Frank Scott added the tag of hope on the end. Didn't detract from Elmore Leonard but made it all click!

A crime drama we happily cop to relishing
In the opening scene of Out of Sight, a richly textured crime drama with characters, plot and humor to spare, a bank robber (Clooney) pauses in the middle of a holdup to smile reassuringly at the teller who's cramming cash into a bag for him. "Is this your first time being robbed?" he asks her. "You're doing great."

Doing great doesn't exactly describe Clooney's movie career to date (although One Fine Day was cute, The Peacemaker, Batman & Robin and From Dusk till Dawn were generic garbage), but his sharp, sexy turn as a gentleman bandit in Out of Sight just may change that. Deftly adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel and smartly directed by Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape), Sight is by far the ER star's best movie. In playing a career criminal who can't get a break (his getaway car stalls in that opening scene, and he's soon doing 30 years without parole), Clooney has finally found a movie role that adroitly showcases his smoldering good looks and smart-aleck demeanor.

Sight shifts back and forth in time, and viewers must pay close attention to keep up, but it's worth the effort. This movie succeeds, more so than either the brash Get Shorty or the self-indulgent Jackie Brown, both also based on Leonard books, in capturing the novelist's cockeyed comic take on small-time hoods and their never-ending skirmishes with lawmen. Make that law-women. Here sultry Lopez is cop to Clooney's robber. She's a federal marshal who, while on Clooney's trail following a jailbreak, finds herself attracted to him, as he is to her. The top-drawer ensemble cast features winning work by Ving Rhames, Steve Zahn and Don Cheadle as Clooney's fellow outlaws, Dennis Farina as Lopez's dad, Albert Brooks as a disgraced financier and Catherine Keener as Clooney's ex, who cheerily advises him, "Honey, try not to get shot." (And watch for Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson, both Jackie Brown vets, in unbilled cameos.)

The best movie of 1998
Others have already commented on the movie itself (which was voted the best movie of '98 by the National Society of Film Critics, beating, among others, Saving Private Ryan), so I'll skip that and move on to the DVD Collector's edition: it's by far the best DVD I've seen. The picture and sound quality are excellent, and there are some great extras: there's a short "Inside Out of Sight" featurette, which is okay, but the real gems are the commentary by the director and screenwriter, and the deleted scenes (22 minutes worth). Among the scenes included in the deleted scenes: the original one-take version of the trunk scene, an entertaining scene with Ving Rhames and George Clooney discussing, among other things, wine and lilic-scented bath oil, and great scenes between Karen (Jennifer Lopez) and her father as well as an extended (and very insightful) scene between Karen and Adele (Clooney's ex-wife in the movie). There's also a different (and much more graphic) version of the Detroit meeting between Karen and Raymond Cruz. If you love this movie in its original form, the collector's edition DVD is worth it for the deleted scenes alone. You'll get a lot out of them.

Other goodies: a nice theatrical trailer, and production and technical notes. This is what DVDs are all about.

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