Later on in this review, I will go more into the strengths of David Newman's score work, which is, in a general musical sense, fairly impressive, as well as sometimes effective as a supplement to this film's atmospheric storytelling, but on the whole, as good as Newman's music is, it boasts a kind of overtly spirited and cinematic sweep that just doesn't belong in a gritty grown-up film of this type, and all too often overemphasizes atmospheric kick to the point of diluting subtlety consistently, sometimes to an overbearing point. With all of my complaints about how sloppy this film's story structure pacing is, this character study isn't as unevenly told as I feared it would be, but it is hard to deny that this is a conceptually worthy biopic that is unraveled with only so much comfort in progression, as surely as it is unraveled with only so much subtlety, even in the musical department. The film feels a bit underdeveloped, as it is just too busy to cook things as crisply as it probably should, and yet, with that said, bloating is just as big of an issue with the final product, which is rich with material that isn't necessarily expendable, but rather forced in, dragging out what points the film does, in fact, extensively meditate upon to the point of igniting repetition. Mostly told in a flashback format, this film takes shortcuts to highlights in the intriguing story of Jimmy Hoffa, and such a storytelling method is generally tight, but much too often, the quick and easy routes taken by this saga's flow hurry things along much too much, not to the degree that I feared, but certainly to the point of really trimming down moments of slow-down that could have been put to good use to flesh this character study out. Don't get me wrong, I like this film and all, it's just that it isn't exactly cleansed of some demons. Now, this film, on the other hand, stands to be a bit stronger. I don't know about y'all, but I myself am busy thinking about how neat it is to see the Joker and the Penguin teaming up in the same year the sequel to Tim Burton's "Batman" came out, because I for one have my fears about Nicholson not being good in this film cleared by the fact that Nicholson is, in fact, as I said, pretty darn good. If you haven't stopped paying attention to this paragraph thus far because I'm rambling at this point, then I've probably lost you because you're trying to figure out whether you should cry or laugh at the fact that, for this film, Nicholson got both a Razzie nomination and Golden Globe nomination. Well, then again, in all fairness, they also gave Nicholson a Worst Actor nod, even though he's really good in this film (Oh yeah, what a stretch), so I think that in 1992, the Razzies were just messing with, not necessarily this film, but DeVito himself, because he also got a Worst Supporting Actor nod for "Batman Returns", and yet Michelle Pfeiffer was totally forgiven. As in Hoffa", and it would appear as though I'm not the only one, because the Razzies had the nerve to wave a nomination over DeVito's barely hairy head. Now, as far as justifying DeVito's actually directing this film, well, I don't know what to tell you, because I don't know if the dude who did "Death to Smoochy" should be doing "Death to Jimmy. I don't know about the cuckoo's nest, but Jimmy Hoffa certainly flew the coop, even if he didn't necessarily want to, so if you're going to get Jack Nicholson as this charming member of organized crime (Oh yeah, what a stretch), then you may as well make up some guy in Hoffa's life for Danny DeVito to play.
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