Rear Window

This movie stinks. I mean, sure, nobody expected Christopher Reeves, of all people, to top Jimmy Stewart's performance in the original, but pairing him up with Daryl Hannah was a brilliant move right up there with allowing Joel Schumacher near the Batman franchise more than once. The wooden performances are only topped by the flat dialogue and stupid script. There's more suspense in the average washing line than this travesty. If you've got a choice between watching this or the original, then there's no choice at all. In case I haven't been clear enough, avoid this thing at all costs.

This movie was painful to watch! I thought I would be in for a treat when it showed up on a Saturday afternoon on the Lifetime Network. Boy, was I in for a load of crap. The dialog is the worst I've heard in a long time...even worse than most TV movies. The acting was atrocious, the camera angles were amazingly bad and, overall, there was nothing believable about the entire thing. And yeah, hey, I know Reeve is REALLY paralyzed and in a wheelchair but does that mean he should be given rave reviews because he brilliantly plays a paralyzed man? Okay, I feel for the guy...but this is a really bad movie and I'm not going to pretend it's not for sentimental reasons. Thankfully, the movie just ended. And, though I'm grateful, the ending was so off I didn't even know it was the ending....I would have begun a wave through my living room had I known! Why didn't I change the channel?..something about watching a trainwreck...what do they call it...morbid curiosity.

Rear Window (1998) ** (out of 4) After a car accident a man (Christopher Reeve) is left paralyzed and begins killing time by spying on his neighbors when he thinks he hears one of them murdered. There's some interesting aspects to this remake of the Hitchcock classic but at the end of the day there are just way too many problems for the film to really work. Reeve is very good in the part, although it took me some time to get involved with the film because the early scenes of him in rehab and dealing with being paralyzed where rather depressing to watch. Daryl Hannah is wasted in the Grace Kelly role and Robert Forster's roll as the detective is very badly written. It was interesting how the filmmakers used an upscaled apartment for a crippled but the actual murder case is very boring and the ending is a big letdown.

A paralyzed architect, who spends his time spying on his neighbours, convinces itself that one of them is a murderer. By freeing itself from the single room location, this new version of one of the Hitchcock classics lose in dramatic intensity. What remains is the emotional test of re-encountering Christopher Reeve.

This movie is so bad it does not deserve to bear the name of one of the greatest movies ever made. About the same as painting a VW red and calling it a Ferrari. Throughout the movie Hannah and Reed seemed to be disinterested in each other until the last scene when they suddenly kiss and pledge everlasting love. Where is this building? How can there be so many titillating scenes going on at the same time in full view? Doesn't anyone ever close the shades? Is this movie about a voyer or an entire population of exibitionists? I am ashamed to say that I watched the entire movie, but I was fascinated that a remake of such a great movie could be so utterly bad.

Although this re-make is OK as re-makes go, it would be next to impossible for anyone to equal the directing genius of Hitchcock or the mastery of Jimmy Stewart. As terrific an actor Christopher Reeves is, I think he bit off more than he could chew when he tried to re-make the character played by Jimmy Stewart, one of the greatest rated actors in motion picture history. The same goes for Darryl Hannah. She is a good actress, but one could easily argue the superiority of Grace Kelly. I admire the attempts of these people, however, when one ventures to remake a Hitchcock classic like Rear Window, one should stay closer to the original story line. They don't call him the master of suspense for nothing.

I only watched this film to the end as I wanted to see how it would end. I wish I hadn't bothered. A really disappointing finale. Reeve is fine but the script is hopeless. Why couldn't his neighbours simply have drew the curtains? Reeve's character's likeablilty goes out the window as he invades everyone's privacy. Hope he can do better than this in the future.