 | |
List Price: $9.95 | | Label: Sony Pictures
Salesrank: 39567
Released: February 29, 2000 |
| Our Price: $3.99 |
| Used Price: $0.12 |
|
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
HARRISON FORD AND KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS IGNITE THE SCREEN WITH PASSION AS AN INTERNAL AFFAIRS SERGEANT AND A CONGRESSWOMAN WHO BECOME ENTANGLED IN A SHOCKING MYSTERY AND AN UNEXPECTED ROMANCEAFTER THEIR SPOUSES ARE KILLED IN A PLANE CRASH TOGETHER. FEATURES: DELETED SCENES, ISOLATED MUSIC SCORE AND MUCH MORE.
Description of Random Hearts:
Reviled by critics and largely ignored by moviegoers when released in 1999, Random Hearts is a pox on the reputations of Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, and director Sydney Pollack, but it doesn't entirely deserve its lowly fate. The movie's lugubriously paced and its repressed passions are dulled under the weight of relentless melancholy, but Pollack deserves credit for defying the Hollywood Zeitgeist with a mature, substantial film about the power of betrayal to reach beyond the grave.
Ford plays a Washington, D.C. detective; Scott Thomas is a Congresswoman in the midst of a re-election campaign. When their spouses die in a plane crash, the cop is convinced they'd been having an affair, and his obsessive, masochistic quest for the painful truth draws him closer to the Congresswoman despite the mutual risks to their careers and domestic privacy. While she hides behind a façade of denial, his agonized investigation makes him simultaneously unappealing (a risk Ford may have taken as a challenge), sympathetic, and sadly compelling.
Pollack takes his own chances by keeping everything so relentlessly downbeat, but anyone receptive to the story will find that Random Hearts is a subtly rewarding study of tormented adults who've discovered too late the weaknesses of their seemingly stable marriages. It's anything but cheerful, and a subplot involving a corrupt cop (Dennis Haysbert) is a formulaic distraction. But Random Hearts provides welcome relief from dramas that flirt with emotional anguish without delving into its deeper consequences. --Jeff Shannon
Random Hearts Reviews:
Detective discovers his own 'internal affair' 
2009-02-01 - Dutch (Harrison Ford) is a DC police sergeant detailed to Internal Affairs who discovers after a plane crash that his late wife was having an affair of her own. This leads him to Congresswoman Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas) who is running for re-election and coping with the grief of learning her husband died on the plane crash as well.
It seems Dutch's wife and Chandler's husband were flying together on that plane as man and wife. As unlikely as that scenario is in post - 9/11 reality, it could have happened back in 1999 when Sidney Pollack first released the film.
Being a cop, Dutch has to know the details of the affair. He drags Kay reluctantly along with him and the two of them begin to feel the inevitable attraction. Mostly the main plot of this story moves at a snail's pace. More interesting is Dutch's investigation of Det. George Beaufort (Dennis Haysbert) for murder, which sadly takes a back seat.
"Random Hearts" is a must for Harrison Ford fans. If you like slow emotional drama, you may also enjoy this film. The soundtrack is excellent.
Rebecca Kyle, February 2009
Morosely silly
2009-01-03 - Two people find out their spouses were cheating, then the jilted ones get together. You'd think this never happened in the history of mankind, from the relentlessly grim way that Harrison Ford plays it. You'll laugh every time someone calls him "Dutch." I liked the relaxed soundtrack, though. Why this has to go on for over two hours, I don't know. It's silly soap opera to the core, but it's not the worst movie of its ilk ever made.
Excellent movie 
2008-12-21 - This is an excellent movie starring Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas and Sydney Pollack. It's a little slow only because of what is transpring...but the story line is excellent. I had been looking for this DVD and found it on Amazon. Good movie...good price!
Random Hearts 
2008-12-08 - The DVD came on a timely basis. I just had a chance to watch it yesterday, 12/6/08. The DVD had a bad place about half way through the movie. I guess that's to be expected with a used copy. I will think twice about ordering used in the future.
How to Tell That Harrison Ford is Alive
2007-09-14 - You can tell that Harrison Ford is alive because his lips occasionally move. His face looks like it is carved in stone throughout the movie, no smiles, no sorrow, no happiness, just a death mask. His wife, and a congresswoman's husband die together in a plane crash. It turns out that they were having an affair. The bereft husband (Ford) and wife (Thomas) sort of fall in love. You sit through this movie constantly wondering why anyone would fall for the wooden Harrison Ford. Don't get me wrong, I like Harrison Ford, but in this flick his affectless performance makes John Wayne seem like Jerry Lewis.
So there you have it, a totally uninteresting romance. This is one movie where you do not see the newly in love couple romping through a flowery meadow. In fact it would be more likely to have Scott take Ford to a mortuary and have him embalmed.
Realizing that the audience will probably doze off from time to time, the director periodically livens things up by having Ford, a police officer, punch somebody out or threaten to kill someone. So that's it, a policeman with total face paralysis takes up with a Republican (in case that matters to you) Congresswoman and they do things together. What things? Well you know, sit on a park bench and eat sandwiches, fondle each other in a car, ransack the apartment where their ex spouses would have their trysts. Finally, the movie doesn't end; it just dies.
Oh, I might add that if you go to the Rotten Tomatoes web site you'll find that only 13% of the top critics found Random Hearts to be an interesting movie. I tend to agree with Todd McCarthy of Variety when he says, "Laborious, remote and strangely uninvolving."
