Restraining Order

I started planning to give this absurd film a 4. As it ground on and got steadily sillier and more violent, I downgraded to 3 and ultimately 2. If it had lasted another ten minutes, we would have been into negative territory! The plot is simplistic and absurd, the acting is at best adequate and hey gang... theres a fist fight on and under the Santa Monica pier. (How often has that been done before? Not for two months, you say?) There are any number of impossible howlers. The worst is the lone rural mail box on the lawn in an urban neighbourhood of fancy homes. Nobody else on the street has one. But then we did need an excuse for the innocent wife to go out to the curb so the bad guys could drive by and... Well, you know the plot. It's all about the mob whacking people. And thats what should be done to this movie. Whack it!

This is a lawyer/mob flick, and the only name among the main players is Eric Roberts, who is rather sappy. It's like a TV movie, has a pretty good plot, but the acting is not great. Not much suspense, sort of like Random Encounter in quality. Not really worth the rental bucks.

-Bob

I really wanted to like this movie but it was so boring that not even my favorite actor of all time can't save it! It's really nothing to talk about but a crappy plot and very unrealalistic characters. I mean it was that bad. Just try to rent something else. Eric Roberts is still a great actor but rent other choices from Eric's video library. Out of 4 stars I give it 1 star. Eric Roberts RULES! though...

One has to wonder if Eric Roberts is appearing in dreck like this just to pay the rent -something anyone can be forgiven for- or whether he consciously chooses these vehicles. If it's the latter, he needs to let someone else make these decisions and stop his once-promising career from spiraling ever more downward. The plot is so preposterous as to turn this film into near-parody. Fortunately, the warning signs are manifest early on, and most viewers will mercifully change the channel before wasting much time on this. It's a truism that it's as much work to make a bad movie as a good movie, and there's not much that Hollywood turns out that doesn't have decent technical standards. But none of the crew's efforts can transcend a stinker of a story.

Stiff acting and sappy acting. Slow story...action too canned. Really weak premise. Almost insults your intelligence. Right at the beginning the killer exposes himself so the lawyer can identify him and then the rest of the movie the killer spends trying to frame people, and force the attorney not to be a witness...really stupid.

The frame up seems far fetched and it would seem to be too unbelievable in real life that anyone would believe it. The mob must have had the whole town on the payroll. There'd be no reason for any of the movie if the whole premise wasn't so stupid. Boring...waste of time. Don't even bother to rent this yawner. However, if you waste your time on this...watch the facial expressions of the extras and minor characters when they are breifly shown...strange eye movements, wierd stiff facial expressions. It's almost as though they look bored, out of place, or like they are lifeless and trying to stay awake.