Great movie, probably one my favorites, although I'm not sure why. Technically, it's pretty sloppy but I just love the cast, the crazy rapid-fire delivery of Turturo, the eerie deadpan Walken, the manic Dunne. Griffin Dunne performs a souped reprise of his role in "After Hours", although he overacts at times, he has the desperate loser role down pat. The movie title, to me, is about searching for what you love and then destroying it, something most of us seem to do over and over again. I like this movie more and more each time I see it, although the sloppiness bugs me increasingly as well. There is a message here about the dangers of pop psychology and new age mantras, but muddled among the nonsense sayings there are some meaningful comments. My favorite is the observation that "We are afraid of change, we are lazy and we are addicted to our pain". How true....
Search and Destroy
1995
Action / Comedy / Drama
Search and Destroy
1995
Action / Comedy / Drama
Plot summary
A would-be movie producer strives to convince a self-help guru to let him film his book. As the guru is only interested in money, the producer solicits the help of a shady businessman and the guru's own secretary, who wants to write movie scripts (a horror story about brain-scraping monsters).
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offbeat, funny, quirky gem
Strangely Funny
Griffin Dunne plays a out of luck businessman filled with debts and no money at all who has the brilliant idea of become a film producer in Hollywood and finally do something that will last, to do something that people will remember him. His dream project is to adapt a famous book written by a guru (Dennis Hopper) into the screen. While on his way to adapt the book he'll meet the potential investors that includes Kim a friendly but suspect businessman (Christopher Walken) and another strange guy (John Turturro),some drug dealers and work with Marie (Illeanna Douglas) former secretary of the guru who wants to write and direct her own film, a bizarre horror story.
In "Search and Destroy" things move like a Coen's brother movie but without the cleverness and the sinister side of one of them. It drags the viewers for an hour and half only with dialogs and dialogs (sometimes it gets very repetitive, the actor talks the same line twice),and then in the last half hour the story grows hysterically funnier and darker, frightening if you prefer. Turturro made the film funnier with his fast talking character and Walken made the story more and more tense, funny sometimes.
And because of this moments and the great cast I'll give a positive review for this film, the only directed by the famous artist David Salle. To many people out there it might seen a boring film where almost nothing happens, looks like empty but it's not. It tells a story of overcoming bad things and creating another crazy situations, the whole thing mentioned by the guru about the rules of life, things that he included on the book and are mentioned over and over by the characters are very sarcastic (things such as "the past is meaningless" and "never say you're sorry"). 8/10
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Amazing cast .... but the film is way less than the sum of it's parts ......
Rarely has such an amazing cast been wasted so badly. Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Illeana Douglas, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, and John Turturro, all jumped on board, only to be torpedoed by a script that seems like nothing more than a Hollywood in joke. Attaching Martin Scorsese's name to this was probably the draw, but the end result is way less than the sum of it's parts. Resembling a nightmare gone horribly wrong, each scene seems more contrived than the next. "Search and Destroy" is nothing more than abstract, stylish, self indulgent nonsense, and the entire film is decidedly dull.......... MERK