Bringing Out the Dead

Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead is a mélange of moods and genres ranging from Gothic horror to Bergmanesque spiritual rumination.

The new picture comes supplied with the same tension [as Taxi Driver], but, though I hate to say so, it feels like a package.

Its hard-to-pin-down tone is frighteningly original -- simultaneously world-weary and adolescent with an aura of perpetual anxiety, as if the characters and filmmakers were in pursuit of a catharsis everyone knows will never come.

An exciting, invigorating return to old preoccupations. Welcome home, Marty.

Of course, it's immaculately crafted and exhilaratingly paced, but in the end it's never as emotionally involving as it could and should be.

Scorsese doesn't trust the power of simplicity to rock us.

A soul-deep mix of medical extremity and spiritual reckoning, Bringing Out the Dead lets Cage sink into the bleary mania of a man strung out on his inability to make a difference.

Chaotic, challenging, and even infuriating.

... revisiting the film brings with it a different response as the chaos is easier to sort through, to identify, and, oddly, to relate to.

It seems like Bringing Out the Dead should be highly complex and multi-layered, but it's unlikely that anyone would walk out of the theater at its conclusion with new insight on anything.