Robert De Niro Sean Penn Film
Robert De Niro and Sean Penn have two of the best faces in the movies - screwed up, sideways faces with a lot of mischief in the eyes.
"We're No Angels" is a movie made for those faces, and one of the pleasures of watching the film is to come across them looking sidelong at each other equally they try to effigy a style out of the complicated mess they're in. The movie has a lot of other skilful stuff to look at (including dramatic period locations in a small Canadian boondocks) and to listen to (dialogue by David Mamet), but I tin remember of no other contempo movie in which so much of the pleasure lies in watching the expressions on the faces of the actors - especially when they're reacting, not talking.
The picture show is set in the 1930s and stars De Niro and Penn as a couple of convicts who are doing hard time in a prison that looks like it was hammered together out of Sing Sing, the Bastille and the underworld in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome." This is a cracking, evil, venal prison, populated past vindictive killers and sadistic guards, and when De Niro and Penn escape from it, freedom is like a splash of cold air in their faces: They go tumbling down snowy slopes in a desolate forest wilderness, until they get a lift from an old lady and finish up in a small border town.
Their objective: to cross the span that spans the river between the United states and Canada. Their problem: They have been mistaken for ii priests and have been given shelter in the local monastery. Their solution: to go on with the gag and pretend to be priests, even though anyone in their correct mind could obviously encounter they're fugitives from a 1930s prison movie.
Mamet and Neil Jordan, who directed the movie, wisely remember the most important thing about whatsoever mistaken-identity one-act: The fact that someone's identity is mistaken is non e'er funny even the first fourth dimension and rarely thereafter. Movies that depend on mistaken identities for their laughs are among the slowest, dreariest slogs through cinema.
What's important is that the heroes be funny no matter who people think they are and that the other characters be funny even despite the mistakes they're making.
Almost of the characters in "We're No Angels" pass that examination, especially the coiffure at the local monastery (Hoyt Axton every bit the prior, Ken Buhay as a foreign bishop who insists on saying grace and Wallace Shawn equally the bishop's translator).
Demi Moore has an important supporting function as a local woman, with a child, who is attracted to De Niro, but because no comic spin was put on her character, her scenes don't add much. They provide, in fact, a serious undercurrent that the movie doesn't necessarily need.
These days, a lot of movies are shot on location, but I've rarely seen a location used more effectively than in "We're No Angels," where the small town of Mission in British Columbia has been dressed up to lucifer the Depression era. The town, the surrounding peaks, the river and the waterfall provide a genuine sense of place. De Niro and Penn are both essentially serious dramatic actors, and peradventure the reality of the location gave them such a solid grounding that they felt they had permission for the necessary goofiness.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the picture show critic of the Chicago Lord's day-Times from 1967 until his decease in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
At present playing
Moving-picture show Credits
Nosotros're No Angels (1989)
101 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/were-no-angels-1989
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