From: marker
Category: Films
Date: 09 January 2005
This is a film destroyed by its structure. It could have been a good old triumph over adversity biopic, but instead Taylor Hackford decided to chop up a sentimental and cliched biopic into a series of staccato scenes inexplicably broken up by flashbacks to RC's childhood, scenes in which there is even less attempt at characterisation than in the adult Ray's life, in which the only person played with any conviction, who has the remotest of rounded characters, is the eponymous Ray. So it's a jerky series of vignettes about Ray's rise to the top and his near destruction by evil old heroin and women, the subplots are never resolved, and he is cured of everything by one of the most bamboozlingly ridiculous scenes ( I keep using this word, because that's all the film is) in the history of cinema. Yes his little brother, who drowned on his watch, says to him in another flashback, "it wasn't your fault". It's someone's fault that this is such a bad film.
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