Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
First class comedy of bumbling hitmen at work and play., 7 Jan 2001
By A Customer
Gangsters and hitmen make irresistible viewing. Bungling assassins are an even bigger hit. Add to that recipe the class acts of a wry and wily Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner and Angelica Huston and Prizzi's Honor is a must-see. This 1985 movie stands apart in the genre of death-with-a-giggle and criminals with a conscience, and ranks for murder and mirth with Luc Besson's "Leon" or Joe Pesci's more recent "Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag". This is another classic Nicholson comedy. Put this video on the shelf with "As Good As It Gets" and watch them and laugh over and over. There's always something fresh or unnoticed in the twists and turns of the plot, the background shots or the dialogue every time you run it. Fine performances, intriguing story and very, very funny.
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2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bullets are hitting the wrong targets and missing the right ones, 11 April 2007
When the mafia becomes the argument of an action film and little more it is no longer funny, it is no longer strange, it is no longer fascinating. It is nothing but outlandish and terroristic. It takes all Jack Nicholson can give to make these characters in anyway palatable, and even so. In the Prizzi family all other considerations than the family is outlawed, except maybe for a couple of weeks and the woman concerned by this out-breeding passing passion has to submit and take the color of the wall on which she is being pinned. If she does not then she will be executed and cut off. There is no depth in that film, no subtleties or even subtlety. Get the message, bang it down on the table and then cram it down your brain. Business is business and in-breeding is the rule. I will always wonder why a hit-woman with a reputation of efficiency and effectiveness misses her husband when he intends to kill her though she manages to shoot one bullet first. Suspend your disbelief and incredulity. The cinema is the new church of the visual dominant animal man is. To see is to believe. But at times to believe is easier when you are blind, and probably deaf too. Apart from that it is interesting even if we do spend a little bit too much time in planes going east and planes going west, kind of an airlift between New York, or whatever may titillate you, and Los Angeles, or whatever it takes to please you.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The less you know about it, the more you'll enjoy it, 31 Jan 2008
So many of the laughs in Prizzi's Honor come from the plot twists (most of them included in the film's trailer, conspicuous by its absence on this DVD) that it's best not to go into it knowing too much. The fact that I'd forgotten so many of them is perhaps why I enjoyed it so much more the second time around. It's a civilized entertainment - perhaps a little too civilized at times, although William Hickey's deathly white vampiric Don gives a whole new meaning to the phrase Cookie Monster - elegantly made and plotted, which wasn't so rare in 1985 but these days is a positive novelty. Jack Nicholson's hamming it up again, but not as much as usual as the luckless Mafia enforcer who meets the woman of his dreams only to discover she's ripped off the family. His comparative restraint helps keep the film from disappearing into slapstick and ridicule, but he still feels something of an impostor in this world - far more so than Kathleen Turner, on good form here as his fatal attraction. Quietly enjoyable.
No real extras on the UK DVD apart from a few text trivia notes, but at least it isn't panned-and-scanned like other titles from theABC library but has an acceptable non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen transfer.
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