Meet Joe Black

[A] glossy but overlong update of Mitchell Leisen’s 1934 comedy Death Takes a Holiday.

A savory, extralong feature whose obvious plotlines unfold with an almost painful slowness that somehow makes them deeper.

To call the three-hour-long "Meet Joe Black" leaden would do an injustice to lead.

I've never encountered such dramatic flatulence, never heard so many pregnant silences that don't deliver, never watched so many close-ups that graze on actors' faces until every last trace of expression has been devoured.

Pitt, who is not asked to do much more here than behave alternately like a robot, a bashful boy and a moron, fulfills his modest tasks with aplomb. When he has to act, though, he fares less well.

You just feel like you're dragging a set of dumbbells around with you while you're watching it.

This is Hollywood at the crossroads of glossy and classy, with Hopkins at the peak of his powers and Pitt at his most transcendent.

A gimmicky premise is made even worse by iffy acting, hilariously bad dialogue, and a slow pace.

Meet Joe Black was a box office flub back in the late 1990s. But the three hour fantasy-romance movie isn’t all bad and like other cult classics like The Room, is so confidently ridiculous at times, you won't soon forget it.

Not bad, just not as good as it could have been had the editor been allowed to hack an hour or so off the running time.