Greenwald, who knew Hoffman in his later years, infuses the film with authenticity.
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
For those who regarded Hoffman as the Bugs Bunny of radicalized Amerika, he wasn't the person played by Vincent D'Onofrio in Steal This Movie, good intentions notwithstanding.
Here, finally, is a film about the '60s that comes closest to showing the true grit and idealistic vulnerability that mixed to make the hippie generation an engine for social change.
Information enters the screen from too many directions ...This is distracting at first, but the movie smooths out and finds its rhythm, and the closing passages are quite moving.
A committed cast but an awkward script and no budget for production niceties.
D'Onofrio's blunderbuss performance obliterates whatever wit and charm Hoffman had.
Deserves to be seen by a large audience for bringing the man's [Abbie Hoffman] endeavors to glorious life.
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.
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.
Vincent D'Onofrio does capture Hoffman's charisma and nuttiness -- and he's the only reason to resist the temptation to skip this exasperating movie.
It's worth seeing just for D'Onofrio's performance, but wait 'till it comes out on cable or video.
The greater part of [D'Onofrio's] performance comes of as simply hysterical and shrill, an overwrought portrait of a raving lunatic who just happened to be exceedingly principled.
The film implies that it's up to something appetizing, but the prevailing vibe is flimsy speechifying.
Most of Steal This Movie plays with all the historical verity and cheapo sheen of a made-for-VH1 original.
The movie does a marvelous job of authentically capturing the look and mood of the period.
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