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Steal This Movie (2000)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:40
Fresh:22
Rotten:18
Average Rating:5.5/10
Consensus: D'Onofrio's performance fails to do justice to Hoffman, and the depiction of the 60s also rings false.
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis:
Steal This Movie charts the rise and fall of Abbie Hoffman -- activist, radical, fugitive, lover -- and leads us through the maze of music, politics and personal struggle of the late Sixties and...
Steal This Movie charts the rise and fall of Abbie Hoffman -- activist, radical, fugitive, lover -- and leads us through the maze of music, politics and personal struggle of the late Sixties and Seventies.
Abbie's story reflects a culture that abandoned comfort for freedom, money for passion, complacency for instinct. He recognized an enlightened breed of renegade soldiers in this hippie generation. They were young, bold, defiant, reactive. They had invaded his home -- the Lower East Side of Manhattan -- and they stood for resistance, reaction and change.
And Abbie would lead and inspire them through love, sex, and revolutionary joy to raise their consciousness and help end the war in Vietnam. Like a psychological Robin Hood, he "liberated" from the materialistic, narrow-minded rich. He burned money and "levitated" the Pentagon. With the love of his life, Anita, by his side, Abbie outraged the establishment and seduced his passion generation into action.
In 1968, Abbie, Anita, and a small circle of friends founded Yippie! -- a band of revolutionaries organized to protest the war at the Democratic National Convention. The police riots that followed made headlines the world over and exposed the repression at the heart of our free society. Abbie stood trial with seven others for inciting the riot and became the court jester and conscience of the proceedings. The group became known as the Chicago Seven, forever a symbol of the litigious battle for political expression in our country.
Abbie's chutzpah and brilliant theatrics earned him his status as counter-cultural hero and led to their release on appeal. Few know the price he paid. Abbie and Anita lived under constant FBI surveillance and endured a Hoover-led smear campaign that cost them work, friends and, finally, their marriage. Hoffman went underground in 1974, leaving behind Anita and a young son, America. They were desperately in love but no longer able to stay together.
Starring: Vincent D'Onofrio, Janeane Garofalo, Kevin Pollak, Jeanne Tripplehorn
Starring: Vincent D'Onofrio, Janeane Garofalo, Kevin Pollak, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kevin Corrigan, Donal Logue, Troy Garity
Director: Robert Greenwald
Director: Robert Greenwald
Producer: Jacobus Rose
Reviews for Steal This Movie
While you may be inspired to get off your lazy ass and change the world, you'll still be left wondering who the real Abbie Hoffman was.
In his attempt to capture Abbie, D'Onofrio ends up with an accent that not only doesn't sound like the way Abbie spoke, but in fact doesn't sound like the way anybody ever spoke.
A committed cast but an awkward script and no budget for production niceties.
Bruce Graham's screenplay ... reduces any of the issues involved to slogans like, 'The personal is political.'
It had no craziness to it... and...its false sense of piety to its subject ruined the whole point of the film.
Seems to be caught between preaching to the converted and reinventing a complex real-life individual without fully exploring that person's humor, complexity and contradictions.
It's worth seeing just for D'Onofrio's performance, but wait 'till it comes out on cable or video.
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