Hero (1992)

Hero (1992)

5/10

Starring

Dustin Hoffman

Geena Davis

Andy Garcia

Directed by Stephen Frears

Hero is a movie you cannot see twice, because the movie is too long and lacks good cohesion between the stories and sub-stories. That is the main problem. There were scenes in this movie that needed to be cut and there were scenes if they were shorter, would have helped in making this movie better.

The movie starts strong and gives us the character Bernard LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) who while in the courtroom for a crime of selling and being in possession of stolen goods, stole a purse. At this point you know the movie has a character that is not going to be easily forgettable.

Then the movie builds a world around this character, we see his ex-wife and his son. We get to see the world he lives in, how he gets by selling credit cards he stole and all the shifty things he does to make money.

Then the movie shows us another world, which at first you wonder how both are going to collide and how much you hope it will be a cool collision. In this other world we have the news people. The lead of this other world is anchor lady Gale (Geena Davis) she and everyone in this world are just weirdly oblivious to reality and have shit for brains.

Why would I say that?

Here is the plot. Bernard as said above is a no good for nothing human who happens to be around when there was a plane crash. He runs into the burning plane and saves the lives of over 50 people.

Many of the people saw him as he was doing his heroic stunts, which was done using overacting. Dustin Hoffman overacted the I do not care about others, but myself and my glory in this save the people from the plane crash scene.

Then after the incident he leaves, tells his friends Bubber (Andy Garcia) the story and gets thrown into jail for the reason he was in the courtroom which was mentioned above. Bubber seizes the moment to tell everyone that he was the one who saved the lives of the people on the plane and gets a reward. Now how Bubber tells the story and how come of all the stories to believe Bubber was the one that the news station believed. The reason the writers had for this was the magical other shoe, which you will understand if you get to see this movie.

The shoe was shown to everyone on TV, but let us assume that only one pair of such shoes exist in the whole world. How can the whole news station fall for this guys story and not even do a good enough check? No one suspected a thing, even the people that saw LaPlante it didn’t come across to them that Bubber was much taller, and Gale when going through the story with Bubber didn’t bother to notice something was off in Bubber’s presence.

Let us add to that, LaPlante who has gotten out of jail and wants to tell his own story could not get anyone to listen. From the time he saved everyone from the plane (before he was thrown into jail) he has been unable to tell his story to one living sole except for Bubber.

Why, well nobody gives him the chance. Which is weird how come nobody cares to know, if Bubber is lying or not.

When Gale finally hears, not from LaPlante and then concludes that LaPlante is blackmailing Bubber. How she was able to jump to that conclusion after she found evidence that LaPlante was probably the hero is something I wish the writers can explain.

There is so many things wrong with this movie and the problems are based on two main issues, the movie is hell too long and the stories lacked cohesion.