Phoenix [DVD]

This was an unexpected jewel! It's hard to explain...it was a slick crime movie, funny at times (the masks) and the main character Harry (the breathtaking Ray Liotta) gets himself into bad situations with a gambling addiction but when it comes down to it he has some kind of...moral compass. As he says repeatedly, don't ever welsh on a bet! He also takes care of his elderly landlord by settling up with the loan shark the landlord used and making it clear that the landlord is not to be loaned to again.It's pretty bloody so in that way it's a bit Tarantinoesque, which is not a bad thing.Anthony LaPaglia is fantastic as the dirtiest of the four cops who hang out together; he bangs one of the other cop's wife, and he collects money on behalf of a loan shark, at one point giving a guy three more days to pay up, in exchange for sex with the guy's wife. Mind you, this is a cop! What I could not STAND was Harry getting interrupted by a poker game invitation while he was with 20-year old (so she said) Veronica, whom he met outside an abortion clinic (the cops were handling a riot there)...she was just there for penicillin (to cure God knows what!). They met, he took her to his place, they started to get it on and it was hot...and the poker call comes in. Well, Harry picks poker over sex but he does tell Veronia to take off her bra and come with him as a distraction. That was hot. So they come back to the apartment and OF COURSE Harry has lost. Big time. And there's no sex; nothing. Harry takes her home and she is pissed. I would be too!You never get to see Ray Liotta have sex in movies...think about it! Tell me one movie he had sex in (I haven't seen them all). I wanted sex to happen! Maybe he has a no sex clause in his contracts. What a waste!Even worse, Harry is totally taken - thunderstruck - when he drops Veronica off and sees her mother waiting at the front door. And whom did they cast? ANJELICA HUSTON??? What the HELL? How about someone at Ray's level of attractiveness? She was SO WRONG for him. Very bad casting there. For the rest of the movie they kissed a few times. Blech.Anyway...give this one a whirl. It's an overlooked goodie.

I'm frustrated at all the reviews for the American movie of the same name reviewed here. Time to set the record straight. I've reported it to Amazon so I hope my review will help. This is a review for the KOREAN DRAMA PHEONIX. It has excellent subtitles and picture quality by YA.STORYLINEThis is the story of a rich girl Ji-Eun who falls in love with poor, hard working student Sae-Hoon who works at a gas station. Same-Hoon eventually falls in love with her as she pursues him daily. As her parents don't approve of him she seduces him in hopes of getting pregnant. They get caught and she's sent away. While she's away she is happy to find out she's pregnant and returns. They get married against her parents wishes on the condition that they won't get help from them. They are happy but poor. Her mother temps her with money. Due to unfortunate circumstances she looses the baby and they divorce. 10 years pass as he was in the United States and returns with a fiancé and she has a boyfriend. You can feel the emotions of the characters and their longing to be together but knowing the reality that it can never be. Sae-Hoon's fiancé is in a wheel chair and turns out to be Ji-Eun's friend. He feels responsible for the accident. She turns into a vengeful and tragic person. Hi-Eun's boyfriend fell in love with her at first sight. They are great together but he develops a dark side. This show has so much feelings and emotions that make you feel like it's really happening to you. That's what great acting is at its best. I won't say anymore on the storyline as I don't want to ruin it for everyone, but it's a must have for my collection. I checked this out of my library a lot. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

I have to feel a little sympathy for the less known Baldwin brothers. Handsome charismatic Alec gets the lead in Rom Coms, sitcoms, does SNL, has a game show in prime time. Stephen and Daniel? B movie action thrillers, direct-to-video movies, the occasional guest shot on a police procedural.As the Dude says, “I’m the Little Lebowski! You’re the Big Lebowski!”Which has nothing much to do with “Phoenix”, the 1998 one. There’re other Phoenix titles, but we’re talking the Ray Liotta compulsive gambler cop movie. Not a wholly original premise. Cop can’t help his gambling habit, bookie or loan shark growls, “You got three days to get the money together or we’re gonna break your knees, etc.” It’s been done a few times before. Check out Harvey Keitel in “Bad Lieutenant” for a similar take, but with more Catholic guilt and iconography.Liotta is never, I fear, going to get another chance like “Goodfellas”. That lightning struck and having struck, moved on. The thunderbolt did not arrive in this outing. Still, he’s not bad in “Phoenix”. Not particularly believable, but he does his lines and hits his marks like a professional. As does Anthony LaPaglia as the most violent and corrupt detective on a team of violent and corrupt detectives. Nice little P.D. you got there, Phoenix. Be a shame if something happened to it….Anyway, these are bad, bad cops and they do bad, bad stuff. Ray Liotta is the second least awful, in that he has a code of never welching on a bet, never informing on a friend and not getting it on with Anjelica Huston’s daughter. Although, honestly, is it ever a good idea to get it on with a woman you pick up outside a free clinic, where she’d gone to get a penicillin prescription? The implications are not favorable for intimate congress. But maybe she just had a cold?Anjelica Huston’s presence in this picture is kind of a puzzler. Her part seems to have been assembled out of bits intended to make Liotta’s character just a little sympathetic. He could use some sympathy, what with being a degenerate gambler who loses money to every bad and dangerous person in Phoenix. Persons he really should be arresting, given that he’s a sworn officer of the court, and all. His chaste romance with Huston takes up some of the already brief running time, but goes nowhere worth going. Of slightly more interest is his ill-considered idea of just how to get all that money he owes to all the wrong people.Daniel Baldwin doesn’t get much to do either, and Jeremy Piven as the moral conscience of the quartet barely registers. He’s (justifiably, in my opinion) upset that his free-spirited wife, Kari Whurer, is doing half of the Phoenix P.D. but other than being hapless, he doesn’t get much character to work with.But hey, isn’t that….yup, it’s Gustavo Fring!! Yay! Giancarlo Esposito, and is he ever young! As the only person of color, he does get saddled with being a loan shark and extortionist and pimp, but he’s livelier than the rest of the cast. And Tom Noonan’s formidable bookie has a nice air of shiny-headed menace going. He’s fun. Giovanni Ribisi is there, although doing little enough beyond cowering as a very young witness. Brittany Murphy, let’s just say that they women’s roles in this movie are not well fleshed out.Is “Phoenix” any good? To be charitable, this is HBO overnight filler, the kind of movie that takes up the space between repeated showings of third or fourth runs of expensive but now faded films. It’s competently made on an obviously low budget.Phoenix is a largish city, but apparently there are only four locations where the cops show up, and three of those are bars. Maybe the same bar filmed from a different angle. Bars are visited, strip clubs are visited (obviously!) and cars drive around. I do like the appearance of the old “soap bar” Chevy Caprice as a cop car. Affectionately known as the whale car, those vehicles do define an era of police motors.Threats are threatened, money is put in wads and envelopes, punches are landed. Everybody smokes, constantly. Half of the dialog seems to be about getting cigarettes, lighting cigarettes, superstitions about lighting cigarettes, passing cigarettes around and exploding cigarettes. So many cigarettes!And there’s some Tarantino-lite badinage about Looney Tunes and Dostoevsky and Cornell, the sort of studied irrelevancies that substitute for the stuff real cops talk about. What, don’t any of these police watch football and complain about their superiors? Piven goes on about how he’s seen “King Kong” a hundred times and Liotta wonders why the monkey didn’t climb that wall all those years on the island. It’s cute, I guess, but doesn’t anything to keep things moving or ratcheting up the intensity.The plot shuffles from bar to bar, menacing conversation to even more menacing conversation, but wraps up with that time-honored device, suddenly everybody shoots everybody else and cut to the credits.Only we don’t cut to the credits; rather, we get a long, long coda in which Liotta orders up a piece of really good apple pie with vanilla ice cream, something nine out of ten doctors would say is contraindicated for someone with a bleeding abdominal wound. Burns some money for no good reason, settles up with Tom Noonan, and drives partway off into the sunset. This is a short movie, but it could have been even shorter without the pie and the truck ride.That is one accommodating truck driver, one who’ll pick up a gravely wounded and bleeding hitchhiker and talk Robert Johnson. The city of Phoenix is apparently in a whole Robert Johnson revival thing, the ancient bluesman is on the jukeboxes, the radio, just in the air. The rest of the Graeme Revell soundtrack is generic, but I did hear some Los Lobos, and I can forgive a lot for Los Lobos.The plot doesn’t flow steadily and the tension does not build. Director Danny Cannon didn’t go much for narrative consistency, but also didn’t do much character development. On the other hand, he’s done a whole lot of television, very little of which I’ve seen but somebody likes to pay for his producing. His best known film credit was “Judge Dredd”, which I kind of liked, and most people loathed. Sylvester Stallone, though. Looked more like Judge Dredd than Dredd did.“Phoenix” is OK for what it is, and what it is, is a mildly entertaining low-cost shoot-em-up.

This s a film I had previously never heard of, probably not released here, or straight to dvd only. It deserves a better showing, as it is not at all bad. It does have a cool feel about it, as if it is going to be better than it actually is. I agree with another reviewer that the Phoenix setting has no relevance, as it could be anywhere. Ray Liotta, who sadly never improved on his finest hour in 'Goodfellas', does his best with a formulaic role, and is well supported by the rest of the cast, many of whom are visibly much better actors. Don't let all the criticism put you off though. At a good price that won't break anyone's bank,if you are a fan of cop thrillers, or of any of the cast, you won't go wrong with this film.

After Judge Dredd Danny Cannons options were this, an average thriller with Ray Liotta treading water career wise.Its actually not too bad but the UK DVD does it no favors with a slightly below average 4:3 picture.Worth picking up if like me you're a Brittany Murphy completist.

Routine thriller when it comes to the story but somehow I quiet enjoyed the pace of this film.Also.routine for Ray Liotta but he does a good job portraiting an desperate gambler.Typical 90's crime flick with some funny characters and dialogue.Will definitely watch this again sometime in the future.....

Having previously not been a fan of what I have seen of Ray Liotta's films I was pleased to say I enjoyed this one. The storyline is good the violence and language not overdone, not a small amount of humour which made me laugh, a great buy at this price as well.

Arrived quickly and enjoyed watching again. Havent seen it for ages. Really enjoyable film.Ray Liotta is his usual moody character and actually plays the hero for a change.A cop with gambling debt bites off more than he can chew when he gets into debt with his bookie