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List Price: $9.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 20249
Released: June 1, 2004 |
| Our Price: $1.99 |
| Used Price: $1.27 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A PSYCHIATRIST BECOMES ENTANGLED WITH TWO DISTURBED SISTES IN A DEADLY GAME OF MURDER.
Description of Final Analysis:
This film, which again pairs Richard Gere and Kim Basinger (who starred in 1986's No Mercy), offers up elements of classic noir: a hapless man becomes intimately involved with a beautiful blonde who may or may not be who or what she appears to be. Dedicated psychiatrist Isaac Barr (Gere) reluctantly, and then more obsessively, becomes involved with Heather Evans (Basinger), the sister of his patient, Diana Baylor (Uma Thurman). Evans is unhappily married to a gangster (appropriately played by a muscular and menacing Eric Roberts in a trademark role). Gere and Basinger make a credible, if dangerous couple, and Thurman delivers a subtle, understated performance and demonstrates her range and potential.
The thriller is appropriately shot in gorgeous San Francisco, where the literal and figurative curving and hilly roads wind throughout. Credit legendary art director Dean Tavoularis for some amazing sets and scenes, notably the elegantly cavernous restaurant where Evans and her husband have a fateful dinner.
This film is, in a way, glossy director Phil Joanou's Hitchcockian tribute--as a climactic lighthouse scene best demonstrates. Final Analysis doesn't offer an intimate look at its characters, but a beautifully stylized one, moody and gloomy. The intricate plot experiments with the device of "pathological intoxication," in which the subject completely loses control after drinking alcohol. And this doesn't mean a conventional ugly drunk; it means a frightening psychotic. Good and evil, hope and despair, beauty and repulsion are often juxtaposed in the film's complex world. --N.F. Mendoza
Final Analysis Reviews:
In The Final Analysis, It's Very Entertaining 
2009-07-04 - Film buffs know about Alfred Hitchcock, the portly director of many exciting thrillers from the 30s all the way into the 70s. If he were alive maybe he would be flattered that this movie was made, which uses elements from the Hitchcock classic "Vertigo"--it's even set in San Francisco! Consider the strength of the cast: Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman, Eric Roberts, Keith David, and a few others whose faces you'll recognize. "Final Analysis" has been slammed for various reasons, but I look at it as an interesting thriller with great performances, atmospheric visuals, and some clever plot twists.
Final Analysis Review 
2008-05-04 - This is an entertaining crime drama with good performance by Kim Basinger and fine score by George Fenton.
Some promising elements but sinks under character and story flaws 
2007-08-02 - This movie has some promising elements. There is a premeditated murder plot with some intricacy, twists, and atmosphere. Kim Basinger does a good job playing a beautiful mystery woman with a troubled past and an exotic, violent illness ("pathological intoxication"). She conveys soft, placid (if overly simple) beauty one minute and psychotic rage the next, and creates a character that rivals Catherine Zeta-Jones' in Traffic for turning on a dime into a memorably driven, tough, and hard-hearted soul.
Uma Thurman looks and acts her slight part adequately enough as Basinger's delicate, spaced-out sister, a patient of psychiatrist Richard Gere. Paul Guilfoyle hams it up as a boorish criminal defense lawyer pal of Gere's. A police detective is tough, crude, and menacing, on cue (barking "Don't yank" a part of his anatomy, at Gere).
But the film collapses under the weight of its many flaws. Gere is completely unconvincing as an "eminent psychiatrist." This has less to do with how he looks than how the movie presents him. At no point does he say or do anything that credibly establishes such a character. His attempts seem limited to occasionally speaking in jargon or hushed tones. He appears gullible and ignorant, as when it takes a lecture by someone else to tip him off by chance to a colorful passage in Freud's work that is key to the criminal's scheme; even one of the plotters had expected Gere to be familiar with it. His supposedly joking answer to Basinger that as a psychiatrist he simply repeats, as a question, whichever last two words are spoken by his patient -- "'Your mother?'" -- hits a little too close to home. It is a truer description of how Gere comes across here than he thinks. Nor does the film give any background that might help explain the personal vulnerability that makes him such a dupe. The character is little more than a dim, steady facial expression and a resume.
Thurman's character amounts to no more than a stagey plot gimmick. She never comes alive as a real person with a real relationship to anyone. The prosecutor is played with gruff style and no substance by Harris Yulin. He is given so little to say and do, and the character accomplishes so little, if anything, that I could not even find him listed in the credits.
Even worse is the Eric Roberts character, Basinger's intense husband with mob ties. It is a tired, superficial, trying caricature that drags the movie down to the level of countless low-budget, rip-off "romantic thrillers." The unoriginal character and portrayal recall cinematic gems like "Play Murder for Me" and "Dead On" (both with Tracy Scoggins), "Tryst" (with Barbara Carrera), and probably dozens of other "abusive husband" exploitation flicks and TV show episodes (ala "Silk Stalkings").
The weaknesses in the characters are only compounded by the weaknesses in the story. The plot flaws become so damaging and distracting that they sap entertainment value right out of the film. Watching the movie becomes like trying to drive a stick-shift down a road full of sink-holes (the film does feature a "ditch"). The abrupt, midstream shift in tone and pacing does not help.
No explanation is ever offered for how the killer was able, in real time, to "hide" the murder weapon from the police - don't they search a crime scene? don't they have search warrants for other hiding places? And this is a plot point that drives most of the movie.
We are supposed to believe that the prosecutor would proceed with a first degree murder trial not only without a murder weapon but without establishing the accused's motive, not even bothering to investigate until afterward exactly who was in line to receive a $4 million payout.
We are supposed to believe that Gere can install himself on the psychiatric board responsible for evaluating the fitness for release from an institution of his own, indefinitely confined lover.
We are supposed to believe -- and cheer -- that two outside professionals would arrive for an interview without introducing themselves or their reason for being there, and that another character would suddenly switch a lifelong allegiance, all so that Gere can stage an elaborate trick on someone he later acknowledges is mentally ill from childhood abuse, only apparently to arrange an even more haphazard, convoluted, and contrived manipulation later by behaving cavalierly and roughly to a patient.
We are supposed to believe that murderers can walk out of mental institutions simply by switching clothes with someone else in a bathroom.
We are supposed to believe that Gere would enlist a psychiatric patient to steal for him, without giving any warnings or taking any precautions to protect the young man from the vicious homocidal maniac with whom this puts him at odds (to compensate for this colossal error, the movie prematurely discloses the man's fate, creating a witness and another potential crime to prosecute and thus undercutting the suspense of whether the killer of the earlier victim will escape unpunished).
We are supposed to believe, for the sake of a quick, shock-effect touch at the end, that, after two court trials had thoroughly publicized the events of the case, a character at the heart of the case would appear to be recycling the exact same modus operandi for future use. And so on.
The movie suffers badly under the relentless battering of these accumulated character and plot problems. Simply dismissing them, as some reviews do with an air of glib pseudo-sophistication, all-knowing cynicism, empty flippancy, or lazy, unintelligent flicking of the "not helpful" button on any review honest enough to point them out is not a serious response. Nor do they simply disappear because the movie inserts some attractive visuals, such as of bridges and lighthouses, or ramps up dramatic music (somewhat frantically and mechanically, starting about halfway through). Any meaningful review has to come to terms not only with the elements of the movie that are promising and likable but with the substantial flaws that prevent it from being satisfying.
about the movie final analysis.......
2006-05-09 - I bought the code 1 of final analysis from Singapore video shop...hee hee and watch have watched it. The story is about two sister whom one of them is a killer and the other is a non killer where the killer finally fell to her death while trying to shoot investigating officer with a gun. (The killer is trying to tell the investigating officer a story and in the end killed his would be bridegroom to death with a dumbell, she later caught the investigating officer for finding out what caused her to kill and she decided to get rid of him). The other woman whom is the sister of the killer finally found a suitable boyfriend. A recommended buy....
Review by:
Ang Poon Kah
PhD (Prof) in political science from Cambridge University and NUS.
PhD (Prof) in Neuroscience from Cambridge University and NUS.
PhD (Prof) in Technology from Cambridge University and NUS.
PhD (Prof) in Security System from Cambridge University and NUS
PhD (Prof) in Computer from Cambridge University and NUS.
PhD (Prof) in film from Cambridge University and NUS.
PhD (Prof) in Business from Cambridge University and NUS.
PhD (Prof) in Electronics Engineering from Cambridge University and NUS.
Bachelor degree in computer studies from Techco University
Zakkers film director
Great Cast-Mediocre Movie
2006-03-12 - Final Analysis was a bit of a disappointment, considering the makeup of the cast: Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman, and Eric Roberts among others!
The movie brings to the screen the story of a psychiatrist who gets romantically involved with the sister of a young woman he is treating. There is more to the two sisters though than meets the eye...
The acting is surprisingly (!)... average, the plot is below average, while the dialogues are way below average.
The major setback is in relation to Richard Gere's character; he is not all that likable and I found myself from the start rooting for the "other side," which also means that I was very much disappointed with the ending...
Eric Robert's character, a raving lunatic of a gangster, was overly exaggerated to the point that it got tiring AND annoying very early on.
As for his being "Greek Orthodox," you will excuse me if I don't get the negative connotation (being from that neck of the woods and all....).
The acting was not that great either; Kim Basinger was unexpectedly (!) plain and bland.
As for the minor/supporting actors, this film does not seem to be their thing. Subsequently, they are not convincing in their roles.
In conclusion, the whole "romantic relationship" began way too quickly and too abruptly, while the last scenes at the pier, the subsequent kidnapping, and the lighthouse, were WEAK to say the least!
Though the potential for a great movie was definitely there it fails to take off. A shame really... No masterpiece here.
