Sling Blade (film): I don't understand all the hooplah surrounding this movie

I had heard about Sling Blade a long time ago and it was only recently that I randomly came across it in some list of 'epic films you haven't seen' or something like that and figured i would give it a go.

After 2 hours of watching I can say that while this film has its moments, it is plagued with really terrible acting and janky set-pieces that don't really make a lot of sense as far as fluidity is concerned. Basically I don't understand how this film has 8/10 on IMDB and a similar score on RT (as well as others.)

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This isn't to say that I think this is a bad film; I don't think that at all. It is reasonably entertaining although it is extremely evident very early on what the end result is going to be. The ending is telegraphed in the first half an hour of the movie.

I think that part of the reason why it is so lauded has something to do with the fact that this film was made on a shoestring budget, was completed in less than a month, and Billy Bob Thornton directed it, wrote the screenplay, and starred in it.

I knew Billy Bob had a lot to do with this but he is unrecognizable in the role of "Carl."

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His voice, the way he moves, just everything about the character of "Carl" is absolutely outstanding. I watched the film knowing that Thornton was in it but even as the credits rolled across the screen I still wasn't sure that I had seen Billy Bob on screen. I was completely unaware that he had played the main role because it was so different from everything else that I have ever seen the man do.

I suspect that this reason is why the film is so highly rated but we need to dig into what actually makes a film great. You can have a wonderful performance by one person in a film but that doesn't necessarily mean the entire film is good. Most of the other characters in this film are terrible actors and nowhere is this most evident in the antagonist of the film named "Doyle" who was played by a country music star named Dwight Yoakam.

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The delivery of almost all of Doyle's lines sound like you gave a sheet of paper to someone that has never acted before and asked them to read them to you. He is extremely unconvincing as an evil stepdad and his delivery of his lines are wooden and awkward. There is one scene in particular where he is meant to be drunk and turns on everyone including his long-time band members and it honestly is one of the worst acted scenes I have ever seen in a film.

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This scene is meant to be tense and showcase that Doyle is a loose cannon that cannot be trusted around anyone, but what really ends up coming across is that nobody in that room save Billy Bob Thornton is actually capable of acting.

I did enjoy the introduction of a gay character in a conservative Arkansas town named Vaughan and when I was watching the actor play this role I had a sense of "I recognize that guy from somewhere!" but couldn't put my finger on it.

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Now that the movie is over and I have seen the credits it seems so obvious who that is but can you tell who that is without cheating? I'll give you a hint... in another show that kind of kick-started his career he had two female roommates and had to pretend he was gay in order to be allowed to live there.

One professional critic had this to say

"it drifts gradually toward climactic events that seem convenient and contrived"

And that is one of the only semi-negative criticisms that this film got from the professionals and I totally agree. We spend a lot of time establishing Carl's re-introduction to the civilian world after being let out of a mental hospital, yet the rest of the film is telegraphed immediately after a chance encounter at a laundromat.

Billy Bob Thornton won the Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1997 and I can't help but wonder if this was awarded to him not because it actually was the best screenplay but because Billy Bob Thornton was relatively new at the time. There was a lot of other, better competition in that realm including The English Patient, The Crucible, and Trainspotting that were also nominated for the same award.

Should I watch it?

First, I love that trailer because that was a point in time where the word of previews or trailers was starting to transition away from voiceover narration of trailers.

I think this film is "kind of" worth seeing but only so you can see how incredible and actor Billy Bob Thornton is. The rest of the cast is pretty terrible and I question whether most of them are actually actors. To me they feel like they were just people that happened to live near where it was filmed or perhaps friends of Billy Bob.

The fact that the story is kind of easy to predict and at a certain point you are just waiting for the inevitable to happen doesn't help it very much, but at that point I was still watching to see if maybe they were going to throw a twist in there that would make my presumption wrong about the extremely predictable ending. They did not throw in such a twist and it ends exactly like you think it is going to. I find this boring with films.

Billy Bob was exceptional but I feel the rest of this film is rather "meh."

_{this film is surprisingly difficult to find on legal streaming services as it is only on Red Coral Universe service and I don't even know what that is}