Bringing Out The Dead
- lindsaybjerregaard
- Oct 26, 2021
- 2 min read
IMDB Synopsis
Haunted by the patients he failed to save, a monumentally burned-out Manhattan ambulance paramedic fights to maintain his sanity over three increasingly turbulent nights.
IMDB Rating: 6.8/10
Our Rating: 4.6/10
Our Reviews:
This dark Scorcese flick features Nic Cage as a world weary New York City paramedic who’s starting to lose his shit after all the trauma he’s experienced in his job. As he starts to melt down mentally, the movie paints a very depressing portrait of NYC in the 90’s and failures of the U.S. healthcare system. The few bright points included Ving Rhames as a cigar-smokin’, hooker-lovin’ paramedic and J Lo’s ex Marc Anthony as a dreadlocked lunatic. It also made me wonder how the fuck Patricia Arquette—Nic’s love interest and real life ex-wife—has managed to win an Oscar, because her monotone, deadpan, Kristen Stewart-esque line delivery left a lot to be desired.
This movie reminds me that I don't actually like Scorcese films. None of those ambulance drivers had any business operating heavy machinery, nor following relatives of their patients into crack dens.
Having worked some jobs in my past that required long hours and little thanks for the sleep deprivation that was surely shortening my life, I appreciated his wide-eyed bleary monologues and nihilistic musings. And yet, despite his exhaustion, he was still out there constantly being the only thread by which late-90s Giuliani-era NYC hung. You can thank him, not Rudy, for being the reason you didn't get stabbed by a raving schizo last time you visited New Amsterdam.
Nic Cage is seeing dead people, except when he forgets to see them because he's too busy ... trying to bang Patricia Arquette? Who is just the concept of chain smoking wearing a vaguely-human skin suit?
New York in the early 90's was apparently only filled with about 500-1000 people and the only time you could do anything was between the hours of 1:30 AM and 4:00 AM. If you are in the mood for seeing hospitals that refuse to transfer patients out of their emergency room to make sure nothing is managed well and EMTs that only hate people, this movie still might not be all that appealing. Side note, but how many brain cells do you think Patricia Arquette's character has in this film, 20; 200; 2,000? That answer is drunk lizard from Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
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