Beautiful Joe

The story cannot be dumber: Joe, a florist originally from Dublin and recently living in the Bronx (my hometown!), finds his wife banging the plumber, after he finds out he's got a brain tumor, so he heads off to find some adventures. He meets Alice (Sharon), who's basically this trashy woman with two kids (one mulatto and the other silent), at the race tracks, and immediately falls in love with her. How believable! How adventurous. Anyway, Joe goes off to talk some sense into local hooligan and loan shark George the Geek, who mistakes Joe for a famous Manhattanian-Irish hitman Beautiful Joe (who turns out to be Joe's drinking buddy Happy). When George finds out the truth, he's set on killing both Joe and Alice. So JOe and Alice take the kids and flee.

The rest of the film gets even more boring and predictable. The movie pretends to be a romance story, but there's very little chemistry between the two main actors. Sharon puts up incredibly bad acting here. Alice says, "oh I'm growing fat and old," and that's exactly how the formerly-lovely Sharon looks in the film. That's not even one-tenth of the problem if not for her poor performance. It's evident that this is not a role she wanted. She's in either for the money, or to fulfill some studio contract. The two kids are annoying, to say the least. When the boy Lee talks toward the end, after Joe rescues Alice from the gansters in Vegas and realizes that Happy (Beautiful Joe) is just a mob associate of his ex-father-in-law, the head of the Irish crime family (Joe wasn't aware of it), Lee philosophizes about life by quoting from a bunch of TV talk shows and the stupidity of this scene just totally stunned me. I never thought Hollywood could come out with something so utterly brainless. In the end, Joe gets a successful surgery and, guess what, lives happily ever after with ex-trashy woman and her two abnormal kids.

This is just absolutely one of the worst movies ever made.

4 of 6 found the following review helpful:

Disappointing Romantic Comedy Lacks Power to Make Us Care  Apr 21, 2003
Before her 2 year hietus due to illness, Sharon Stone stared in this romantic comedy with Billy Connolly, as a single mother called "Hush," whose life is full of messy relations with men and gambling. The film is directed by Stephern Metcalfe, and is the first job as director, who has been working as scriptwriter in Hollywood. But you will be impressed with somebody else.

The film is, in fact, about an amiable Irishaman living in America named Joe, who is effectively played by Billy Connolly, best known for the film "Mrs. Brown" opposite Judi Dench. Joe, seeing that his life as a good-natured flowerist is too boring, decides to travel, and meets Hush. After several misadventures including horse-racing, mud-wrestling, and an encounter with local mobsters (Gil Bellows, TV's "Ally McBeal" and Ian Holm as his boss), Hush comes to like him, so does Joe, among the kids whose life has been so far neglected by Hush.

The best thing you can find about "Beautiful Joe" is Billy Connolly's amicable portrayal of Joe, who fares among the clithed moments better than you expect. We can understand that people around him all like him, as the film depicts. Even Ian Holm's Hannibal-like caricature of gangster looks funny before Connolly's incredibly innocent talk, and there are some good moments in the film, especially when those veteran actors are allowed to do some tricks before us.

But too bad that no one among the crew seems to have pointed out that this kind of film fails to interest us when it looks as if going automatically. I do not see why Joe should fall for Hush, who treats him very bad at first, and keeps on chasing her. The gangster plot is too familiar after our seeing films such as "Life Less Ordinary" or "Get Shorty" and many, many others, and the inclusion of kids is also too clithed. Or, if I may sound too harsh, let me say that at least they should have give them (kids) more decent dialogues.

Sharon Stone seems miscast at first, but actually her acting is not so bad as you may think. It is rather her constant change of hair-styles and costumes that annoys us, making us wonder why these changes are needed. Actually, she was much better in the similar role in "The Mighty" (and duely nominated for Golden Globe), but here her heavy make-ups look as if to show the lack of confidence. They should not have done that.

As a whole, "Beautiful Joe" is a disappinting film because of its lack of originality and confidence. So, why gangsters? The film has one saving grace Billy Connolly which they should have used more effectively.