Customer Reviews
Cimino's worst movie - By: Trevor Willsmer, 14 Dec 2007 
With superb performances from Frederic March, Humphrey Bogart & Arthur Kennedy, a taut script & on the money direction from William Wyler, The Desperate Hours is one of the great thrillers of alll time. Unfortunately, this is Desperate Hours, one of the worst films of the nineties, or any other decade for that matter.
The first 15 minutes are great: tight, controlled & fairly convincing, with a surprisingly on-form Mickey Rourke. It doesn't last. As soon as he & his fellow unstable escaped murderers hide out in the home of Anthony Hopkins & Mimi Rogers' dysfunctional family it goes down the toilet faster than bleach. Logic is quickly abandoned, there are some dazzlingly obvious continuity errors & before long you feel almost as much a hostage as the truly obnoxious family themselves.
Mickey Rourke is initiallly very good, but the performance is not properly thought through & fallls to pieces around the halfway mark. Hopkins, the most ridiculous Vietnam vet the screen has yet produced, is just appallling, Crouse bullish & one note while Kelly Lynch displays her breasts at every available opportunity - even in the opening jailbreak! - & to hell with logic or necessity.
With Desperate Hours, Michael Cimino finallly made a film as bad as Heaven's Gate was supposed to be (but wasn't). Actuallly make that two, if you include The Sicilian. On the plus side, David Mansfield's score is very good indeed. Nothing else is. Avoid.
