VividSimon Simply Perfect

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

paintcan ...regardless the worth of the movie. Lonely Hearts was exactly as advertised. Fact based film of a violent nature. Loaded with great talent that delivered a great movie.Casting was dead on the mark. Entertained my wife & me.Spouse rarely sits through a movie with this violence level but she watched all of Lonely Hearts. I sought out James Gandolfini movies when he died. All have been good,this one better than good. We are 70 years of age FYI. One problem with this site is requiring 10 lines of text. That is where some of these on an on reviews come from. I was educated and trained to not waste words. If you can't deliver a consumer review of a movie in less than ten lines,I'd say you are padding.

secondtake Lonely Hearts (2006)A steady, interesting, colorful crime movie packed with both great old tropes from the film noir days and lots of familiar tricks. Amazingly, it's based on a true story from post-war America that goes way way way beyond the slimmed up version here. The result is good, yes, but never mesmerizing, never a complete surprise, and never up to the potential of the either the source material or the talented cast. The very dependence of well known formulas for a kind of classic look and feel is what holds it back, because we know those formulas so well. The one aspect to the movie that is forcibly modern is the one that feels so forced it's almost pandering to a contemporary audience--lots of open swearing and sexual references in a manner not really "right" for a 1951 America.Several lead actors are terrific. Salma Hayek, once she arrives, is an edgy bad girl, a woman with little moral code and a comfort level with blood and manipulation that makes an old school femme fatale look like schoolroom stuff. Her bad boy companion, Jared Leto, at first comes off as a Robert Downey Jr. wannabe, but he gradually hardens up his edges and by the end is pretty believable as a cocksure murderous idiot. The two cops, John Travolta and James Gandolfini, are a great pair, the one restrained and more in tune with the criminals, the other the sidekick with a good heart. (They might be modeled after, say, Glenn Ford and William Bendix, as two 1951 actors who could have pulled off the same roles with more conviction.)The filming, the editing, the pace, the sets, the old cars, the interior and exterior location shoots, all of the nuts and bolts are in place here for a good movie. (Of these, the photography is the most routine, partly because of how it's directed, as in the last scene when the cops swarm the house--it could have been really exciting.) But overall it's the script--the script, not the story--that holds it all back. The parallel plots of the two criminals in their love affair crime spree and the cops on their trail is clear and fine, but unrevealing. The events happen, and we sort of know how it will end. And it does (not to give away anything!). If you want the true facts, go to the really long but readable account at trutv.com and type in the Lonely Hearts. As a quick and hopefully helpful movie comparison, you can look at recent films like "Road to Perdition" or "Shutter Island" and see how a period piece film can brim with originality and better filming. A movie comes closer to this kind of familiar quality, based on older classic Hollywood models, is "Public Enemies" with Johnny Depp, though that one had some really beautiful moments in the photography. And what about that title? It is derived from the male killer's original tactic for getting money, which is given a comic treatment at the beginning of the movie--he writes to lonely women, gets them to fall in love with him, and steals their assets.A final revealing note: the director is the grandson of the cop who led the original investigation into the crimes. That means he's really well placed emotionally, but as a director he's really incomplete. It's amazing, in fact, that he got the budget and talent he did with such a short track record. Opportunity squandered? Partially. Give it a chance.

thekyles99 Real life murderous couple Martha Beck (Salma Hayek) and Raymond Fernandez (Jared Leto) and their murderous love affair is the main story of Todd Robinson's Lonely Hearts. Detective Elmer C. Robinson (John Travolta) his own life a tragedy in itself connects deeply with these two killer lovers as he neglected his own wife so much chasing these two that she took her own life leaving him alone to raise their son. This is the story of Robinson's crusade to bring this bonnie And Cyde type couple to justice. With the aid of his partner Det. Charles Hilderbrandt (James Gandolfini) Robinson tracks these two across the u.s reaping all of the aftermath of their crimes. I hated my comparison to Bonnie And Clyde as they only robbed banks and maybe shot the odd policeman who happened to get in their way. Beck and Fernandez were way different Fernandez who was infatuated with Beck and would even kill for her and did, and Beck who was psychotic in her returned love for robinson Quoted as saying : I was the only woman for Raymond. This movie could've fallen in the footsteps of Bonnie and clyde if it was only made a tad cooler and more believable. Hayek is awesome in the role in fact left me wanting to see her again in the future in a psychotic role. The only part of this that i didn't like is Hayek is extremely beautiful with a nice figure and the real life Marth Beck was anything but. Weighing in at 250lbs she always feared losing Fernandez to one of his cons. Which made her all the more jealous and murderous. Leto does a solid job as fernandez however i didn't really get the fear that this couple really invoked from these two actors. This movie needed a lot more spooky overtones.

tieman64 A number of big budget noir and crime films were released in 2006 ("Black Dahlia", "Hollywoodland", "Miami Vice", "The Departed", "Lonely Hearts Killers" etc), all revolving around parallel story lines.Here we have John Travolta playing a world-weary police detective hot on the heels of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, a pair of con artists who meet wealthy women through personal ads, steal their money and murder them. This may sound generic, but director Todd Robinson is less interested in noir mechanics than he is in chartering the creation and dissolution of the film's two central couples.So on one side of the film we have Travolta and Laura Dern, a pair of police officers who learn to push past the suicide of Travolta's ex wife and forge a romantic relationship together, whilst on the other side we have Martha and Raymond, a pair of romantically involved criminals who slowly degenerate into a pair of raging lunatics.What's interesting about the film is the way the two halves seem to exist in completely different time zones. Travolta's plot line is strictly modern noir, with all the appropriate updates, whilst Martha and Raymond seem to exist in a cartoon universe of 1930's gangster and (pre Hays Code) couples-on-the-run movies.Indeed, half the fun of the film is watching Raymond turn from a hilariously dapper con-man into a nervous wreck due to Martha's increasingly psychotic antics. She needs her con man lover to feign romantic interest in their marks, but throws jealous tantrums whenever he gets close. It's funny stuff, and at times quite bizarre.7.9/10 – The film works well when Raymond (marvellously played by Jared Leto) and Martha (Salma Hayak as a deliciously over-the-top femme fatale) are on screen. Travolta's plot line, however, is standard fare, the film eventually fizzling out to a rather lacklustre climax.Worth one viewing.