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Fierce People Reviews
Director Griffin Dunne, working from Dirk Wittenborn's adaptation of his own novel, pounds away at the analogy between the inherent cruelty of the tribal rituals of the Iskanani and those of the well-heeled.
| Dec 3, 2007
On balance, it's a movie worth seeing with its artistic inserts, appropriate soundtrack and organic performances.
| Original Score: B- | Nov 24, 2007
There are lots of potent things floating around in it -- sexual initiation, drugs, fantasy-land wealth, brute violence, primitive rituals, Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland -- but the mix just sits there without producing any notable reactions.
| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 21, 2007
Rarely has self-pity become so monotonous so quickly.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 21, 2007
A buoyant coming-of-age adventure welded to an amiable wealth fantasy.
| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 21, 2007
After a promising start, Griffin Dunne's film bogs down and simply turns into a predictable mish-mash of a movie that is shrill and heavy-handed and totally trite.
| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 21, 2007
The film is way too banal to raise any questions of its own. [Director] Dunne, for his part, doesn't conjure up any kind of inspired visual atmosphere or compelling psychological tension. Nothing is as funny, touching, true, or sad as it should be.
| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 21, 2007
Dunne's messy, unpredictable, yet weirdly vital movie veers from one extreme to another without finding a consistent tone, but Sutherland never strikes a wrong note.
| Original Score: B- | Sep 20, 2007
The idea that rich people are an alien tribe is just one of many that get lost in Wittenborn's distracted script.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 20, 2007
Overplotting and a particularly ugly turn make this adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's novel less a meditation on how the rich are different than a bland coming-of-age procedural.
| Sep 20, 2007
A movie that practically begs you to hate it. Wish granted.
Full Review | Sep 10, 2007
Director Griffin Dunne's adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's fiercely personal novel ambles pleasantly through coming-of-age movie territory, then takes a jarring Agatha Christie detour.
| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 7, 2007
The last act promises some very dark and primitive acts -- not that you should care.
| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 7, 2007
When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the rich "are different from you and me," he might have been thinking of someone like the moody billionaire from Fierce People.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 7, 2007
A textbook example of the hazards of hiring a writer to adapt his own novel.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 6, 2007
Fierce People is based on a forced premise: the idea that a family of super-rich New Jersey eccentrics is like a tribe to be studied anthropologically. None of the characters resembles any creature you'd discover in nature, however.
Full Review | Sep 6, 2007
Structured around the type of analogy that makes one pine for total sensory failure, a desire amplified by the filmmakers' clear self-satisfaction with what they believe to be a clever narrative conceit.
| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 3, 2007