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You Don't Know Jack Reviews
After spending more than two increasingly dispiriting hours with Pacino's raspy eccentric, I still didn't know a lot more about Kevorkian than I had going in.
By the end of the film, viewers still may not be sure what makes Jack tick. But you'll have a better sense of Al, one of the premier actors of our time.
A biography of "Dr. Death" may seem like an odd choice for a TV movie, but this is a very good, thought-provoking film. And Pacino and the rest of the cast are great.
A vein of messianic righteousness can be detected below the surface, but mostly this Kevorkian is delightful-which doesn't seem quite right. It's an ingenious performance, though.
Even as stars Al Pacino, Susan Sarandon and Brenda Vaccaro dim their wattage with clumsy Michigan accents, bad wigs and dowdy clothes, a compelling story about Kevorkian's advocacy for euthanasia emerges.
Viewers may not know Jack at the beginning of the film, but they have a somewhat better sense of this enigmatic character by the end.
There are many, many haunting scenes in HBO's docudrama You Don't Know Jack.
Should make for a fascinating and nicely tangled story. The trouble was that the programme turned it into a straight fight between goodies and baddies.
Kevorkian boasts that he can "go weeks without food, like Gandhi." Pacino, by contrast, clearly recognizes the big, juicy meal laid out in front of him by this peculiar character, and it's a pleasure watching him greedily consume it.
Pacino spends most of the two-plus hours of "Jack" being a distraction in his own movie.
He's not quite unknown, but he is a puzzle, one the film presents with a mix of fascination, bemusement, and occasional awe, but doesn't pretend to solve.
The result is a pro-euthanasia argument told as a lovable-old-coot story. It's probably the best way to sell such a grim tale.
Losing himself entirely in the role, Pacino is outstanding as Jack Kevorkian, stoop-shouldered and self-confident but with an air of permanent sadness.
Displaying its own media savvy, Jack is sympathetic to Kevorkian but not polemical.
Pacino and Levinson seem to have made a deliberate decision to keep Jack's rough edges. There is no attempt to make him heroic; we have to come to any such decision on our own.
Ultimately, there's little wrong with You Don't Know Jack and the performances alone make it worth seeing, but it's a good film that never quite rises to great.
Director Levinson provides some stylish angles and sequences, but his real achievement is shaping Pacino's performance and keeping the material fresh and passionate.
You Don't Know Jack may be a film about the case for making dying patients comfortable. But admirably, it recognizes that thinking about this, or watching, should be discomfiting.
Levinson has a deft touch with ordinary people and places, and the film's early scenes, especially, take care of business in a satisfying, sideways fashion, developing character with exposition and finding every avenue for real-world humor.
We're like Sarandon's Janet Good, begging from our deathbeds for Jack to tell us something about himself and arriving at the end of things without any greater understanding than we had at the start.