WhatzUp

Bringing Out the Dead
by Derek Neff

Paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage) is beyond burnt out; he begs his dispatcher to fire him, he drinks on the job, and he routinely implores his partner (a different one each night, played in turn by John Goodman, Ving Rhames and Tom Sizemore) not to take emergency calls that come on over the two-way radio. Worst of all, he's beginning to see the ghost of a young woman he once failed to save everywhere he goes. Martin Scorcese's fever dream of a movie takes place in the early-90s, in the Hell's Kitchen district of New York, but the squalor and violence have an exaggerated, cartoonish quality. Screenwriter Paul Schrader, who also wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver, seems to be parodying himself; instead of taking a serious look at the disintegration of a person existing under difficult conditions, we instead are given a series of mildly compelling vignettes that seem more like the build-up to a joke. Bringing Out the Dead works fairly well as black comedy -- of the other movies in Scorcese's ouvre this one most closely resembles After Hours, not Taxi Driver -- but don't expect to know anything more about any of these characters by the end than you did at the beginning.