NETFLIX MOVIE REVIEW: RAIN MAN

by commentnewspaper
KEVIN BURKE, Content Editor–

netflixmoviereview_logo_design

For this week’s Netflix Movie Review™, I chose to watch 1988’s Rain Man, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.

Rain Man is a story about a man named Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) whose poor relationship and rotten feelings for his father resurfaces when he finds out that his father has died and left him next to nothing in his will.

Instead, the majority of his father’s estate had been given to Raymond Babbitt, Charlie’s older brother whom he had no idea even existed. Raymond is autistic and lives in a mental institution, but he possesses an incredible memory and great organizational skills, as well as being somewhat of a math genius.

Charlie decides to “kidnap” Raymond from the institution, and tells Raymond’s doctor that he’ll only return him if he receives half of his father’s estate. Raymond and Charlie then go on some crazy adventures filled with fun, frustration, and emotional growth that cements their life-long bond as loving brothers.

Now, if I’m being honest, this movie was just okay. I guess it was good, but I know I’m probably never going to watch it again.

Tom Cruise is just so annoyingly Tom Cruise, too. I think I actually hate him as an actor. I don’t know what it is, but every time I watch him on the screen I just think, “Ugh, you’re the worst.”

One scene that drove me crazy was the scene where Charlie discovers that Raymond is the “rain man,” and also why Raymond was sent away as a boy. In that scene, Charlie pieces together facts about Raymond’s past with very little information, and then audibly says his findings aloud solely for the benefit of us, as an audience. It just seemed extremely fake and unrealistic to me.

Rain Man was the highest grossing film of 1988 and took home four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Actor (Hoffman).

The Comment officially gives Rain Man two and a half stars out of five, and recommends you read reviews written by a less pretentious movie critic.

Kevin Burke is the Content Editor of The Comment. Follow him on Twitter at @ke7inburke.

+ posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related

Celebrating 40 Years of “Transformers”

Originally released on August 8th, Transformers: The Movie, was immediately famous for not only its iconic press release, but also the controversy with Hasbro, its parent company’s decision to kill off a pop culture hero, Optimus Prime voiced by the late Peter Cullen, within the first 27 minutes of the movie. This resonated through families […]

by Ryan Benoit

TV Show Review: “Monsters: The Lizzie Borden Story”

When you think of true crime in New England, I can guarantee that the Borden Murders are one of the first cases to come to mind. The case’s infamy has led into many different books and media, all aiming to tell different versions of what happened on August 4th, 1892; with varying degrees of accuracy. Most recently, Netflix released Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, following a trend of the company adapting famous true crime cases into new anthology series. This one […]

by Madisyn Sentes

Book Review: “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt”

This is a book about death. But it’s also a book about life. This is a book about learning to live in the present moment, to find particles of life all around you, to find reasons to live. It’s about not letting grief pull you down, it’s about learning to love the life you see all around you, it’s a book about making the […]

by Mikayla Coffin

Riot Grrrls To the Front!: A Bikini Kill Concert Review

Words cannot express how much Riot Grrl music means to me.  The loudness, the intensity of the music itself, and the incredibly bold atmosphere that promotes everyone to be themselves unapologetically. Especially when I was younger, these messages meant the world to me. Growing up, this music made me feel so big- as though I […]

by Isabella Cicconi