Cheap The Untouchables (Special Collector's Edition) (DVD) (Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De Niro) (Brian De Palma) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Untouchables (Special Collector's Edition)

WOW
Brian DePalma, who helmed many Hitchcockian fantasies with varied success (Carrie, good; Raising Cain, awful), here does a spectacular, witty job of creating an old-fashioned, gorgeous drama/thriller. Kevin Costner is perfect as Elliot Ness; he has rarely been better, and Sean Connery is explosively powerful in his Oscar-winning role as the Irish cop. Robert DeNiro is menacing and funny, too, in the deadly role of Al Capone. The movie is drenched with style, from the Armani costumes to the evocative Chicago sets. It is a testosterone fantasy, to be sure, but a supremely satisfying one. Legend has it that, out of time and budget to create a finale aboard a train, DePalm improvised the finale, which places a baby carriage in the line of fire within the train station, a creative take on a classic sequence from Eisenstein. It works, as does all of this movie. The Ennio Morricone musical score (Cinema Paradiso) sets the tense and powerful mood from the stylishly inviting opening credits, and delivers a swelling, string-filled finale as the film reaches its stand-up-and cheer ending.

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GREAT MOVIE!!!
It's prohibition, and Chicago's bootlegging business is running rampant--a slap to the justice department. In Chicago, the cops are dirty, state government is corrupt, the citizens deitify Capone, and the gangsters rule the town. Elliot Ness(Costner), a do-gooder looking to catapult his career, heads a random group of characters (the untouchables) against EVERYONE. He enlists an old irish beat cop(Connery) to teach him how to bring Capone down. In this relationship b/w Connery and Costner is the heart of the film.

The acting is first notch. Yes, even Kevin Costner is good in this movie. But Connery and Deniro really steal the show. The duo delivers quotable lines throughout the movie. Sean Connery: "He pulls out a knife, you pull out a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chee-Ka-Go way." Absolutely brilliant.

DePalma is brilliant. The grandiose style of music and imagery bring you back to the time of Prohibition. There are some scenes where you don't even watch the actors b/c you're too busy marveling at the set.

The DVD. Well, given that it's not "Collector's Edition", "Criterion Collection" and so on...you can guess on the content. Almost NONE. It's a standard bare bones DVD. I was pleasantly surprised by the picture and sound quality though. The sound and visuals compare to modern day movies.

This Movie is so watchable. I can picture myself watching this movie once every year or so...and enjoying it every time.

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Touchable...
This film marks several remarkable firsts: The first true representation of a David Mamet film script (although "The Verdict" in 1980 came first), the leading-man status of Kevin Costner (deservedly so, since despite disasters like "The Postman" and "3000 Miles to Graceland", he's a very good actor with a very impressive resume and an Oscar to boot), Sean Connery's first Oscar win, also very much deserved, and most importantly, the first good film from Brian De Palma. People call films like "Body Double", "Carrie", "Blow Out" and "Dressed to Kill" classics... why they do, I have nary a clue. Those are some of the worst rip-off films in history. His "Hitchcockian" feeling is, to me, straight-up plagarism. He rips off plots and shots that are embarassing mish-moshes of Hitch's best (and worst) stuff. And did you see "Mission to Mars"? I didn't think so. And the only people that I can imagine that liked "Femme Fatale" were fans of the bathroom sequence (If you saw it, you know what I'm talking about). The only other film of his that was worth watching was "Mission: Impossible". But "The Untouchables" is a real work of art. I won't go into plot points, but I'll comment on the film's great points: 1) The dialogue is sparkling. Mamet makes these people real as opposed to just making them standard action caricatures (the young idealist, the grizzled old wise-man, the cocky rookie, and the dorky fifth-wheel). 2) The performances are top-notch. Costner, Connery, Martin Smith, Garcia, De Niro, and an underrated performance from Richard Bradford as Chief Dorsett really help to pull this film off. They give it all they got. They make the tragedy and drama and excitement and horror and triumpth of this film work. 3) The visuals are stunning. Stephen Burum really makes that camera work, especially with those beautiful shots of LaSalle Street. This film is a great revisionist telling of the Eliot Ness vs. Al Capone brawl. The film obviously takess a lot of liberties with history, but they really work, especially with the dispatching of one particularly bad man which in my opinion makes for the MOST satisfying film death EVER. It really makes you happy to watch this guy bite it ("Did he sound anything like THAT?!?"). This is a great film and I could not recommend it more highly. But go ahead and skip the rest of De Palma's 'classics'.