Mary Reilly
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Movie Reviews of Mary Reilly
Movie Review: Julia Roberts shines...
Summary: 3 Stars
...in this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film. I've never been a Julia Roberts fan but she was pitch perfect in some key scenes. A good, if not great, morality tale.Movie Review: Disappointing...
Summary: 2 Stars
This movie should have been a LOT better than it turned out to be! One can imagine the meeting at the producer's office at which it was pitched: "OK! We're going to retell the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde... only from the point of view of Dr. Jeckyll's maid, Mary Reilly! Let's get Julia Roberts in the title role and John Malkovich to play Jekyll and Hyde!" Sounds like a winner, no?
No!
One is never quite sure who is to blame for all the missed opportunities here; whether the studio wanted to make one film and the director another, or whether director Stephen Frears just made bad choices, but this movie never quite jells. Indecision seems to plague it at almost every turn. When it should be scarey, it settles for being merely creepy. When it should be creepy, it is merely weird. When it should be suspenseful, it goes conventional.
Julia Roberts seems more constrained in this picture than Winnona Rider and Sadie Frost do in their corsets in "Bram Stoker's Dracula." She stays in her "wounded bird" persona throughout the entire film. The trouble is we are given no preamble to explain why should be that way, and no development to explain why she should stay that way.
John Malkovich, ever the unconventional actor, makes an astounding choice with his character, choosing to play Dr. Jekyll
not as the obsessed mad scientist we're so familiar with, but as a doomed Byronic romantic. His Mr. Hyde is just the flip side of that doomed romanticism, blatently sexual, full of spontaneous, unrestrained libido. It's a brilliant choice. If
Frears had picked up this cue and run with it, we would have had an interesting film about the "fallen angel syndrome" which has been the bane of the dating scene for the last 50 years. Some of the single women in the audience might have actually stopped asking: "Where are all the good men?" long enough to ask themselves: "Why am I always so attracted to bad boys?" Alas!
Hollywood today is either incapable or unwilling to make a movie that asks its audience to think!
So, instead we get a film which can never make up its mind whether it wants to be a horror movie, a "doomed love" story or a "Julia Roberts vehicle." By trying to be all three at once, it fails to be any of the above.
How disappointing!
Movie Review: She Wrecks Another One
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm not a Julia Roberts fan.But I was willing to give her (another) chance with this story because I loved the novel so much. And the idea of seeing John Malkovich play both Jekyll and Hyde even had me excited to rush out and see this movie its opening day.
Duped again.
The novel was great: it's the Jekyll & Hyde story told from a maid's point of view. It's faithful to the smallest detail to Robert Louis Stevenson's telling, but you're seeing it from the next room (the best way to read them is to read the original story first, then MARY REILLY).
But I should have known that "America's Sweetheart" would toss every nuance of integrity to make herself the center of the show: while the novel's tension focused on Mary's fear for the kind doctor who is obviously being blackmailed by Hyde, the movie has both Jekyll and Hyde falling madly in love with Julia.
A uni-brow maid who can't keep her Irish accent straight.
Right.
I wanted so much to like this movie.
Please do it again.
And leave Julia free to do NOTTING HILL II....
Movie Review: If negative stars were a rating option, I would use them
Summary: 1 Stars
This movie had an interesting idea going for it in the beginning, but the bad acting, bad script, bad lighting, and horrible accents, killed it. I feel I lost brain cells just watching it. The only "scary" or "disturbing" part was Malkovich's face, which hardly ever changed into a believable expression. Robert's accent changed from scene to scene with upsetting regularity, which was extremely disappointing.
If the point of this movie was to show how "misunderstood" Jeckyl and Hyde may have been, it did a thoroughly awful job.
I would recommend a root canal over this movie, as it may be less painful.
Movie Review: What was the casting director thinking?!?
Summary: 1 Stars
I don't know why this movie got so many great reviews on here. The movie is not bad, but is certainly not good. However, what makes this movie really horrible is Julia Roberts. I am a HUGE Julia fan, but her performance in this movie is laughable. She can't hold a stead Irish accent-- at times she sounds like good old American Julia, and at other times, a VERY strong Irish accent comes out of her mouth, with no explanation for the sudden change. I believe this must have been a critical point in her career, at which point someone must have told her, "stick with what you do well... romantic comedies!"