What a waste of my time!!!

Sadly Over-hyped

Excellent but underrated film

A Disappointing Continuation

This was a great movie for me. Why? Because I've only seen it once and 20 years later I still remember the details and the disturbing impact it had on me.On the night of viewing I went to bed and had nightmares as a result of this movie.Alan Parker is one of the great directors. Rourke is a great actor. The rest of the cast including De Niro were excellent but, unlike Parker and Rourke, they were replaceable.The horror of this movie is not revealed until the climax, which makes it different to the standard fare and puts it well into the A category.The plot of a sleazy private detective being hired by a creepy and somewhat malevolent client to track down a debtor who has disappeared is soon revealed to be a mere vehicle designed to unveil the real story. What we are left with is a shocking and hellish view of the world as seen through the eyes of a psychopath.For Parker, this was an even better film than Midnight Express. For Rourke, this was better than any of his films - far better than The Wrestler or Barfly

The cinematography, the pictures, the sites, the atmosphere - very good. The story - good enough to make something memorable out of it. But...The acting and directing is so poor. Mickey Rourke is such a "nothing". He is maybe handsome but you don't buy it in the movie. Cool ? Clever ? Emotional ? No, just nothing, no depth, no character, just a bum walking around. And that is the last thing such a story should do.The directing - every time there is action I asked myself "why are they running around ?" You just don't buy it, like the whole story in total. And everything looks so unconnected. No depth creation for the main character is the most serious lack of the movie.Can't keep wondering what David Fincher could have made out of it.

I love Mickey Rourke, I love Robert de Niro. Rourke is OK, such a lovely face, such presence, always watchable. But de Niro is crap - not helped at all by a terrible script and a clichéd role. What was he thinking? Could he have ever been so desperate for work? Very confusing film, I couldn't work out what was real and what wasn't, and the ending doesn't make sense to me - if Angel is really Johnny what is the relevance of him killing all those people? Or is it so they don't identify him? I have no idea. If he had changed into looking like the soldier then wouldn't Margaret have recognised him anyway? It could have been good but cinematically is so clichéd and irritating. And I am not a huge fan of seeing chickens killed, thank you very much.

Alan Parker has established himself as a versatile master which can cope with a prison parable based on real events («Midnight Express», 1978) or a youth musical («Fame», 1980) and the film adaptation of the rock opera («Pink Floyd The Wall», 1982) or a dramatic story about the fate of the soldiers with the "Vietnam syndrome"(«Birdy», 1984), to the end of the decade, based on the novel by William Hjortsberg «Fallen Angel» (1978), made ​​his most gloomy and atmospheric a film in which "the biggest hope and biggest disappointment of 80s" - actor Mickey Rourke, who is at the peak of creative forms, played his best role of his career. «Angel Heart» became the quintessential postmodern exercise Parker styles. The film, which began as an urban noir in the scenery of New York, quickly turns to the mystical path of detective, changing geography and immersing narrative stuffy Southern Gothic's macabre of New Orleans (one of the most famous scenes in the film Parker pays tribute to the creativity of Andrei Tarkovsky and his masterpiece «The Mirror») to the finale taxied to Revelation: insight to the protagonist (and with it, and to the audience) comes too late in the literal sense - Angel really is an angel, only Fallen Angel. The entire film is agonizing attempts restless soul Angel defer its verdict. But like any self-respecting noir, he was doomed from the beginning, long before the meeting with the infernal Louis Cyphre an impressive performance by Robert De Niro. Herein lies the paradox of film noir genre - the sinner is committed to the Lord prescribed redemption, but in vain. Fan blades (one of the main visual symbols of the film), like the wheel of history, continue to cyclic rotation, only the acceleration time is almost tangible stuffiness inevitable fate, and a lift to the scaffold is already waiting, just press the call button.