Rapid Review: Rain Man (1988)

“What you have to understand is, four days ago he was only my brother in name. And this morning we had pancakes.”
– Charlie Babbitt 

SYNOPSIS: Selfish yuppie Charlie Babbitt’s father dies and leaves a fortune — to Raymond, the institutionalized savant brother that Charlie didn’t know he had. They set out on a cross-country journey of discovery. – via IMDB

You know, Tom Cruise get hated on way too much. I believe he is quite the crackpot in real life, but I think he is a pretty good actor, and to see him with Dustin Hoffman here was well worth it. Tom Cruise plays a real mean twit in Rain Man, a money hungry dweeb who is bitter that his father wrote him out of his will, and even angrier when he learns that he has an autistic brother he knew nothing about, and that Raymond is entitled to everything. Half the time you just want to slap Charlie for being an insufferable toolbag, and Raymond is highly amusing at the best of times. “Uh oh” became synonymous with something hilarious on the way, and “definitely” was also paired with laughter. However, as much fun as this movie is, there are flaws to it, too, which are often overlooked. They aren’t all glaring, and not all terrible, but some things just don’t work out as well as you would like. I am not a fan of the score, and the pacing was also a bit of an issue at the best of times. Some events were extremely unbelievable, too, which detracted from the movie for me in places. Something I did like a lot, however, was the accuracy that they went with in displaying Raymond’s autism spectrum disorder. SPOILER: I also like that there was no perfect, happy ending because that would have been so unrealistic and ruined the whole thing for me. I had quite a laugh while the brothers were in Vegas, very good! Anyhow, Rain Man is entertaining, contains quite a few decent performances and is enjoyable, though flawed.