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Bonfire of the Vanities

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4.1 out of 5

556 global ratings

5 star		56%
4 star		17%
3 star		14%
2 star		7%
1 star		7%

Bonfire of the Vanities

byTom Hanks

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Top positive review

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A good film that needs to be re-reviewed

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2019

It has been 28 years between viewings for me on this film. Now I was a fan of the book and hated the changes the filmmakers did but after recently reading the book on the making of this film (The Devil's Candy) I decided to view this film once again and I was surprised how much I enjoyed the film.

Now this is not a masterpiece but the film does tell the story about how "Greed" does corrupt and and how many different types of"Greed" there is. Everybody wants something from someone. The film does however alter the "Sherman" character a tad too much but at the end of the day the film works.

I hope critics will re-evaluate their opinions of this film. Since its release the film seems to have been ahead of the curb on many issues! This was an expensive film to make! The budget overruns were not the fault of the director. The studio needed to take some of the blame. However De Palma took the brunt of the negative press. The film has flaws but it is still A GOOD FILM TO SEE.

11 people found this helpful

Top critical review

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This Bonfire Blows Smoke.

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2021

A disaster of an adaptation. The cast includes some of the biggest stars of the day, which makes it that much more of a disappointment.

The director didn't seem to understand the source material. Writer Tom Wolfe created a true-crime story, where the facts were all tinged in shades of gray. The film removed that moral ambiguity and replaced it with something much simpler, something that is not quite serious and not quite a comedy.

Having just read the book, I was still confused by scenes in the movie - Why was the kid in a coma cheesing for the camera? This film is a mess.

3 people found this helpful

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From the United States

A good film that needs to be re-reviewed

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2019

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It has been 28 years between viewings for me on this film. Now I was a fan of the book and hated the changes the filmmakers did but after recently reading the book on the making of this film (The Devil's Candy) I decided to view this film once again and I was surprised how much I enjoyed the film.

Now this is not a masterpiece but the film does tell the story about how "Greed" does corrupt and and how many different types of"Greed" there is. Everybody wants something from someone. The film does however alter the "Sherman" character a tad too much but at the end of the day the film works.

I hope critics will re-evaluate their opinions of this film. Since its release the film seems to have been ahead of the curb on many issues! This was an expensive film to make! The budget overruns were not the fault of the director. The studio needed to take some of the blame. However De Palma took the brunt of the negative press. The film has flaws but it is still A GOOD FILM TO SEE.

11 people found this helpful

This Bonfire Blows Smoke.

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2021

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A disaster of an adaptation. The cast includes some of the biggest stars of the day, which makes it that much more of a disappointment.

The director didn't seem to understand the source material. Writer Tom Wolfe created a true-crime story, where the facts were all tinged in shades of gray. The film removed that moral ambiguity and replaced it with something much simpler, something that is not quite serious and not quite a comedy.

Having just read the book, I was still confused by scenes in the movie - Why was the kid in a coma cheesing for the camera? This film is a mess.

3 people found this helpful

Holds up in 2018

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2018

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This is a terrific movie: thoughtful, :funny and politically incorrect. Make fun of the NY political scene, media circus vultures, social class norms, along with the justice system. What makes it most enjoyable is that although fictional, it emphasizes the bizarre NY society in sketches that seem extremely close to reality. Holds up 30 years later, since the same craziness remains today. Only criticism would be Tom Hanks as wall street mogul, but matters little to the impact of the movie.

13 people found this helpful

A movie that just gets worse with each viewing.

Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2020

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Sometimes you want to re-evaluate a bad movie just because you want to see if, years later, this movie had more to give. This has less than I remembered. Tom Hanks, usually great to watch, is sadly miscast here. And a part that the late, great John Hurt was born to play went to Bruce Willis..seriously ?? Why Hitchcock disciple, Brian DePalma, was picked to direct this is beyond me when clearly it required the light, cynical touch of someone like Mike Nichols. Maybe the producers didn't get past the the first 30 pages of Wolfe's savagely funny novel while binging out on cocaine ?? After all it was made at the end of the go-go 80's.

2 people found this helpful

Bonfire smoldered but sadly the fire died out

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2018

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I took a chance that this 25 year old movie would have stood the test of time and I can report that for me it didn't. It's always a bad sign when I'm fast forwarding through chunks of the movie to see the end and even then I just didn't care how it ended, only that please make it end. This was a Brian DePalma film and he was well respected in the industry, so I thought I would be okay. I actually think part of the problem is the out of sync miscasting of the main characters. Bruce Willis a drunk big city reporter - nah, Wholesome Tom Hanks as an immoral, money hungry Wall Street bond salesman - hah, Melanie Griffith as a loosy goosy woman bordering on being a prostitute, she's close but no cigar and her characters name of "Maria", doesn't fit her either. I think so much has happened in our world since this film was made and better depictions of the corrupt side of Wall Street like The Wolf of Wall Street, it leaves Bonfires is a pile of burned out embers. One final observation and it catches me even when I watch old Cary Grant movies and that is phones. In Bonfires, the Hanks character has to walk in the rain to the corner and into a pay phone booth to call his mistress. I keep thinking that any moment, hei'll whip a smart phone out of his pocket but of course doesn't. In his day, the acerbic writing of Tom Wolfe ("Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby" - a collection of is essays) was all the rage and later "The Right Stuff" about the Mercury Seven Astronauts and test pilot Chuck Yeager has aged better I think because of all the history and daring involved w/these men). Bottom line, save your money on this movie.

3 people found this helpful

A movie so crammed filled with bad decisions, almost every scene left me scratching my ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2016

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A movie so crammed full with bad decisions, almost every scene left me scratching my head with thoughts of "Why?" and "How?" From the early scene of Bruce Willis entering as a bad-boy writer(?!?), the movie announces what a train wreck it is going to be with a "happy and upbeat" score. This should have played as a dry comedy with biting satire, but instead the musical tone is that of a light and happy 80's comedy. The movie only goes downhill from there, mostly with the casting. I could not believe for even one minute Tom Hanks as a "Master of the Universe" or Bruce Willis as a reporter, let alone a smart one. He isn't even a convincing drunk. But worse than all of this is that the movie is boring. The best thing that can be said for the film is Melanie Griffith -- she actually ads some life to the whole exercise, but how many times can she play the "I'm horny" card to take the audience's eyes off the fact that there is not a whole lot happening here? Best use of the movie is as a companion piece to Julie Solomon's book, "The Devil's Candy," about the making of the film.

10 people found this helpful

28 Years Later, It Works as Satire

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2018

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(Edited when I bought it on BD)
Had I seen this in 1990, when it came out, I might have agreed with Maltin: BOMB.
But seeing it now, it looks like a satire on various topics: race relations, sex relations, politics, greed … the list goes on.
Anyway, this is the story of a 1%-er and a very ditzy, very Southern lady who take a wrong turn and flee the scene of an accident. The case becomes what the DA bases his mayoral campaign on, and the facts don't matter.
The BD plays just fine and the film was just as funny the second time around!

7 people found this helpful

Annie Van Auken

"'What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses...' Ah well. There are compensations." (last lines)

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2015

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In watching Brian De Palma's THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990) it occurred to me that one of the main elements of this story is more relevant today than it was a quarter century ago. In this partial class/race warfare tale, Tom Hanks is passenger in his Mercedes and his mistress, Melanie Griffith severely injures a black youth who has tried to rob Hanks while the two were lost in the South Bronx. Recklessly driving the Mercedes, Griffith runs the young man down, and as he's hospitalized in a state of coma, the NYPD find Hanks, who has been hiding in terror at his Park Ave. apartment.

Bruce Willis, an alcoholic newspaper reporter near the end of his career, writes an inciteful story about Hanks and helps to turn this tragedy into a near race riot. And that is what is all too familiar in recent years: the mindless crowds of protesters, along with looters who take advantage of the moment by burning and stealing everything not nailed down. A bleeding heart media doesn't help matters any. It's all happened far too much.

Also here is an anti-white, money-grubbing attention-whore reverend, whose well-chosen words stir the mob to near-violence. Sounds somewhat like Ferguson, Baltimore and other such unfortunate places in the recent news.

This momentous issue aside, at the time of its release "Bonfire" totally fizzled out. A $47 million budget realized only $15 million in box office sales. In hindsight probably a well-dseserved rejection, but in lieu of recent events, the film shows much prescience.

It's hard to watch this still worthy picture without letting the above considerations affect one's perceptions. But perhaps that's a good thing.

Paranthetical number preceding title is a 1 to 10 IMDb viewer poll rating.

(5.4) The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) - Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall, Saul Rubinek, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Dunn, Clifton James, Donald Moffatt, Alan King, Richard Libertini, Rita Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Malachy McCourt, Richard Belzer, George Plimpton (uncrediteds: F. Murray Abraham, Geraldo Rivera, Brian De Palma)

2 people found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2018

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Outdated yet somethings hold up. Don’t miss the scene where he has to take his dachshund out in the rain. He had to drag that little guy across the marble floor, raincoat and all! Things like that are really always the same! But seriously that’s not what I’m talking about. This movie is a much deeper satire. I probably should have appreciated it more. I had to read the book for a book club and ran out of time so I watched the movie. It’s just not one that would usually be in my wheelwell or one that I could plow through. There was so much more I really wanted to read without having my arm twisted.

One person found this helpful

the masked reviewer

LET'S SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2004

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This is a really good movie!

Brian De Palma's film version of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES was savaged by the critics with a vitriol that still seems remarkable. Remarkable because it is one of De Palma's tamer movies, no doubt eviscerated for not living up to the same image critics held in their heads when they read Tom Wolfe's enormously popular novel three years earlier. The movie's nastiest pans came from journalists comparing it to the book--one called it a "fascinating calamity" and another, more frighteningly, commanded readers to "destroy this film."

Watered-down as it may be, Bonfire of the Vanities politically and artistically is a challenge -- a visceral wake-up call to the mind and the senses. To watch De Palma lampoon the self-indulgence of the '80s, as Wolfe did much more straightforwardly in his book, is to be forced to confront a long list of off-kilter images and incongruous tones -- embodied here by the innately good-natured Tom Hanks's performance as Sherman McCoy, a slimy, adulterous investment banker; Melanie Griffith's gleefully absurd vixen mistress Maria Ruskin; and, most important of all, the sudden and jarring shift from farce to straight-faced moral declaration that is Morgan Freeman's masterful courtroom speech.

"I don't do satire," De Palma reportedly said in an interview. And so it's true. De Palma prefers to wear his parody with a big, dumb grin--or with his fangs fully protracted. Tom Wolfe's novel was satire; the movie is broad comedy, playing up its characters' vices and follies to viciously cartoonish levels, rendering them more laughable than contemptible. This is why it was ultimately necessary that the movie's corporate sleaze bucket be played by Hanks, who up to that point had been tied to light comedies. And why, naturally, Melanie Griffith chose to make her character more daffy than sexy; likeable or detestable, De Palma's protagonists fumble at everything they do. And it's worth noting that both actors punctuate their billboard-size representations of greed, racism, and infidelity with some of the more gut-busting moments in movie history, such as when Griffith squeals at the ominous sight of two approaching black men in the Bronx, "Oh my God, natives!"

De Palma's characterizations may not have the subtle tongue-in-cheek wit of Tom Wolfe, but his version of the story is both more comic and angrier for it. His sinuous camerawork, (expertly captured by master cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond), suggests a fiery examination of New York's racial and economic head-butts -- if critics were searching for the film's muscle, this is where it is. A glorious time-lapse shot opens the film, observing 24 hours in the city's vibrant goings-on from atop the Chrysler's building's high perch. On one hand ecstatically unifying all New Yorkers under one sky, the image is also strangely foreboding, as a peering eagle statue looking down on the landscape insinuates the precarious social imbalances that exist among different neighborhoods. Never since has there been such a brilliantly singular distillation of a city's cultural strife.

For all its polish, Bonfire of the Vanities can become stunningly hot-tempered, a quality most journalists are too quick to ignore. A cutting sorrowfulness underlies slapstick humor that can quickly turn violent. When guests at a cocktail party condescend to his downfall, McCoy runs them out by blowing shotgun pellets into the ceiling. Here Hanks's point of view is the camera's, and so his character's frustration is the audience's, and that of every one of New York's underdogs, rich and poor, who struggle to find genuine human feeling within the city's partisan theatrics (signified here by a crooked Mayor, a savage media, and a pretentious intelligentsia, one of whom hysterically fawns over a gay poet by saying, "He's on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.").

But not hopelessly, as Morgan Freeman articulates in his genius climactic speech -- absent from the novel -- playing the only good-natured character, a judge who presides over McCoy's case. With a gavel in his hand to symbolize De Palma's own measured plea for common sense, and approaching the camera directly as if to lecture the audience, Freeman turns various groups' self-righteousness back on them, exposing each one's duplicity and crying out for "decency." "It's what your mother taught you," he explains, in a down-home vernacular that reverses, radically, the movie's giddy parody into earnest speechifying. It's still self-aware, of course, but the sentiment is meant sincerely.

De Palma doesn't do straight satire, and as such his coda puts everything prior into a clarifying moral focus while simultaneously challenging the way we watch movies: In an unjust world, law is our "feeble attempt" to make things right.

Bonfire of the Vanities is De Palma's.

10 people found this helpful

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