One of the worst films I've ever seen at the Toronto Film Festival; this was compared by the program book to Robert Altman's The Player, but plays instead like a rejected TV pilot for a third-rate network. It's a film of big ideas, in particular about the folly of America's obsession with guns; presumably it's this liberal agenda that enticed an astonishing cast, each member of which is as bad here as they've ever been before (Jeff Daniels plays an arrogant businessman who gets away with murder; Joan Allen is the wife who leaves him to work for loopy billionaire Gary Sinise; they and four or five others get intertwined in a web of violence). The film is painfully stilted, relying on a monstrous series of coincidences and improbabilities, with no sense of character or naturalism, evidencing no research into how things actually work or look or feel. Sometimes it seems intended as a black comedy, but it's not remotely funny; it's gimmicky instead of parodic, banal instead of ironic. The film says nothing useful about guns, but almost everything about pretentious amateurism.
Review of All the Rage
