I hadn't seen this film but had heard good things about it and knew the 'twist'. It was shown on Film4's 'Films for Life' season in April 2011 so finally decided to watch it and was astounded by how bad it was. I'm bemused by all the comments here about the good script, good acting, etc because I experienced the exact opposite. The acting was appalling, especially Forest Whitaker and Jaye Davidson; Whitaker's English accent made Dick Van Dyke's Mary Poppins accent look good. It was all over the place, varying from Cockney to Australian to Texan American in one sentence. He was obviously concentrating on the accent as his acting was very hammy. Davidson was perhaps the most wooden and un-natural actor I've ever seen on screen - his happy, sad, drunk, murderous and suicidal were all delivered with the same emotionless deadpan monotone. The dialogue was stilted and full of cliché after cliché. The plot was unreal and relied on suspension of disbelief - apparently English people cannot distinguish between a thick Belfast accent and a Scottish one (wait a minute, that's Americans isn't it?); apparently the IRA plot the assassination of politicians off-the-cuff the day before in the back of a car with a 5 minute run-through and then, when it goes wrong, just wing it and deliberately instigate an OK Corral shoot-out....oh my, such a bad film
Review of The Crying Game
