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Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 19 Reviews)

Andy Garcia's best performance among a stellar cast.
I often wonder if director's purposely set out to cast as many eccentrics as possible. We've seen it when Abel Ferrara cast Willem Dafoe and Chris Walken in New Rose Hotel, combining seemingly two of the most bizarre actors in Hollywood. And don't forget At Close Range, which combined Crispin Glover and Walken. Also, Steve Buscemi and Walken were together in Pulp Fiction. Are you noticing a common element? That's right: Walken.

He's here in a bit, but pivotal, role as a mob boss who employs reformed former associate Jimmy "The Saint"(Garcia), nicknamed The Saint due to his former aspirations to be a priest, to do a simple "action." Well, Jimmy and his crew screw up BIG TIME and the crime boss, known on the streets as the "man with the plan", tells Jimmy to leave town or else.....


Jimmy has a moral conflict due to the fact that "the man with the plan" resfuses to offer Jimmy's crew the same mercies. Things gradually digress, with Jimmy's crew finding themselves the victims of a progression of assassinations at the hands of one Steve Buscemi, known here as Mr. Shhh.

A very good film with many name-brand actors. Andy Garcia does a phenomenal job here, a job that is the best I've seen from him - ever. Here's a list of actors from this film that you'll either know by name of by face.

Andy Garcia
Christopher Walken
Don Cheadle
Steve Buscemi
Jenny McCarthy
Christopher Lloyd - yep, Doc Brown himself
Gabrielle Anwar - best known as Chris O'Donnel's fling in Scent of A Woman
Jack Warden - Big Al from Problem Child
Treat Williams - Bill Pulman lookalike
Fairuza Balk - Vicky Valencourt from The Water Boy
William Forsythe - Flatop from Dick Tracy, also plays cops a lot, as he did in The Devil's Rejects.

Between Balk, Buscemi, Walken, Forsythe, and Lloyd, Gary Fleder has grouped a collection of some of the most bizarre character actors in Hollywood. The affect is fun, though, as you see many faces and names amid this tremendous screenplay and plot.

This is one of the more underrated films I've ever seen. The only problem with this film is that is came out in 1995, not a good year for a film to try to shine with films like Heat, Leaving Las Vegas, Casino, Seven,and The Usual Suspects gaining much attention in terms of the crime/city genre.


an all star cast in an empty post Trantino style movie
Andy Garcia (Twisted, The Unsaid) who has a few good moments in this movie, plays Jimmy The Saint who is assigned by a parapalegic Christopher Walken (Wedding Crashers, Envy) who's already played this character before only this time he has no feelings in his legs, you see and Walken, he tells Garcia to do a job and so Garcia assembles his crew of 4, William Forsythe (The Devil's Rejects, The Rock), Bill Nunn (Spider-man movies), Christopher Llyod (Back to the Future trilogy) and a crazy as hell Treat Williams (Deep Rising) but the problem is, of course, the job goes terribly wrong so Walken tells Garcia him and his boys have so many hours before his hitman, played by Steve Buscemi (Armageddon, Reservoir Dogs), who has the coolest name for a hitman, Mr. Shhh, comes and kills them all. Garcia then goes crazy, he also has falling in love with sexy Gabrielle Anwar (The Grave) and he doesnt want her in jepoardy and he also is trying to help out this girl who works the streets and so on and so for. Really empty drama thriller with an all star cast and the cast are the following: Jack Warden, Bill Cobbs (Air Bud), Fairuza Balk (The Water Boy), Glenn Plummer (Speed movies), Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda, Crash), Josh Charles (Four Brothers), Jenny McCarthy (BASEketball), Marshall Bell (Starship Troopers), Tommy Tiny Lister, Jr. (5th Element), Sarah Trigger (PCU) amd Don Stark (That 70's Show). All that in a so-so post Tarantino style movie.

Takes itself waaaayy to seriously
About the only cool thing about this movie is its title - and that's actually from a Warren Zevon song. Everything else in this movie is fake - pseudo-hardboiled, pseudo-noir and bathed in synthetic-cool - to cover up a threadbare and often preposterous story involving "street thugs gone straight until..."

But, what's it about? Jimmy "The Saint", the head former thug is a likeable Andy Garcia, acting with his soul and not his hair but otherwise trapped in a bald plot. Having given up his day job of earning money the oldest of old-fashioned ways, Jimmy now seeks a more benevolent profit - video-taping the final words of wisdom of the terminally ill. For all his charm, Jimmy can barely unload free brochures. Instead, he's summoned to the home of a dying and paraplegic arch-criminal known throughout the movie as "The Man With a Plan" but more accurately described as "The Man Too Creepy NOT to Be Played By Christopher Walken". "The Man" has a problem with his son Bernard (not known as "The Man, Jr.") - the younger guy has begun losing his mind since losing his girlfriend. Convinced that things will turn around for his rapidly sinking son if he gets old girlfriend back, "The Man" hires Jimmy to "brace" the luckless woman's new boyfriend.

Brace?

Immediately, you can sense what's wrong with this flick. Steve Martin once quipped that France was just another country where they use different words for everything. What Martin thought was funny gets the big serious treatment in Scott Rosenberg's lame script - in which presumably hardened and fearless criminals rely on a dizzying array of incongruous jargon to keep from explicitly describing their evil actions, and fall back on a reservoir of Hollywood wisdom to fill gaps in the action, which are unfortunately many. "Brace", we soon learn, means to inflict terror through a massive beating. Other scary terms are "Boat Drink", but especially "Buckwheat" - referring to any unusually painful, prolonged and humiliating form of execution reserved for those incurring the wrath of "The Man". Jimmy rounds up his gang of three others - including Treat Williams as "Critical Bill", a psychotic loose cannon who uses corpses as punching bags and is obsessed with his own bodily waste, and Christopher Lloyd, who's losing fingers and toes to some disease probably connected with his job in a porn-theater. Jimmy's plan involves masquerading as cops during a traffic stop of the new boyfriend. As you might have guessed, Jimmy's plan for bracing is fated for failure. The boyfriend, ironically the smartest character inhabiting this story, isn't cowed by his prospective bracing, and gets whacked. What the story never tangles with is how incredibly and mind-numbingly inept Jimmy's plan was to begin with. (With their ill-fitting uniforms and Lloyd's missing fingers, Jimmy's cops look as real as those used in an Ed Wood movie.) Unfortunately, Jimmy's bracing is not only botched, it's fatally botched - Bernard's girlfriend dies, and Jimmy's gang now faces a serious "Buckwheating". The second half of the movie has our heroes searching for a way to get out of Denver alive, even as they contemplate their lives' ends. The script's pseudo-jargon gets heavier, and the story gets even thinner - meaning that we'll get even more Hollywood wisdom from Jack Warden's character (an old time gangster who inhabits a favorite malt shop, and ends up having to explain much of the terminology and "back story"). It's no spoiler that Jimmy will end up on one of his own video postmortems, but we're hoping to get something more than the script's arch insights. We don't even understand questions raised by the basic plot - nothing Jimmy and co. do suggests why "The Man" would rely on them to whack (sorry, brace) anybody, let alone a rival for his son's affections. Apparently, The Man does have his own enforcers - a point made fatally clear for The Saint by the end of the movie. Even the setting seems forced - it's obviously Denver, but the story could have taken place in any of the modern yet unidentified American cities of countless made-for-TV or straight-to-cable movies.

Though typically compared (unfavorably) to anything done by then by Tarantino, "Things" is actually something worse: it's a bare Tarantino movie based on the same model Rosenberg would use on "Beautiful Girls": the old buddies, arch dialog and phrases substituting for a skeletal plot, shallow sentimentality, treacly Hollywood wisdom and a meandering story that never goes anywhere. Even the characters of the two films match up - with the psychotic Treat Williams approximating the more genially delusional character played in that movie by Michael Rapaport. (Both characters don't allow their lunacy to get in the way of the script's attempts to put knowing self-awareness into their dialog; In "Girls", a character jokes about checking Rapaport's character's fridge for human heads; in "Things", William's character stores his urine in milk jugs). I hated having to sit through the false wisdom of "Beautiful Girls" once, and decided that the least important thing I knew I wanted to do in Denver when I was dead was to catch a better movie.

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