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22 comments in total

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Emilio and Demi and a neat original concept, 9 September 2005

Author: jguz58 from Mesa, Arizona

I've watched Wisdom several times, and still enjoy it every once in a while. I've always been attracted to films with an original idea in them, and this is that kind of flick.

I like Emilio Estevez anyway, and to see him get his first chance to direct was cool. Demi Moore turns in an enjoyable, believable performance too, as did Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright.

The particulars of Wisdom's methods might be a bit muddy, and the end not entirely satisfying to some, but this film is waaay more watchable than what's been out at the theaters lately. Can Hollywood really be SO out of good, original ideas?

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7 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Portrait of a naïve young man--by a naïve young filmmaker..., 26 August 2006

Author: moonspinner55 from redlands, ca

23-year-old screw-up decides to "screw the system" by pulling bank heists across the Southwest--not for the money, but to destroy mortgage documents and home loan statements, thereby giving financially-strapped landowners a few months to catch up on their payments. While a noble cause, the young man and his accomplice-girlfriend soon find this isn't exactly a profitable way to become illegal heroes; when he eventually resorts to stealing cash, his adoring public turns on him. Clumsy and awkward directorial debut from Emilio Estevez (with help from veteran director Robert Wise), who also has the lead role and wrote the screenplay. This is the type of vanity project which begins with a baby-photo montage of its star, quickly becoming a derivative 'lovers on the run' saga for bleeding hearts. The script has enough holes to drive a gas-guzzler through, but Estevez left himself an out by concocting a jaw-dropping conclusion. It may carpet the mistakes, but it's a prank played at the viewer's expense. *1/2 from ****

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Modern day Bonnie and Clyde and so forth., 20 October 2004

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Emelio Estevez makes his writing and directorial debut in Wisdom, the story of a guy named John Wisdom who finds himself in sort of an early life crisis, I guess. Barely entering the real world, he is coming to realize that life is harder than he has been brought up to believe, and he becomes convinced that all this stuff he's been hearing all his life about how he can be anything he wants is not really true, and so he sets out to do what any rational person would do in such a situation. He embarks on a dizzyingly adventurous life of crime and the freedom of the open road. All can only end happily for everyone involved.

But rather than become your typical bank robber, Wisdom, after brainstorming at length about the type of criminal that he aspires to be, decides he's going to be a criminal FOR the people. No one can be hurt by his crimes except for big evil corporations and, more specifically, greedy banks. Wisdom believes that he has been dealt an unfair hand in the game of life, and sitting in a bus station in the early part of his wandering, he sees a commercial that convinces him that this he's not the only one. Millions of hard working Americans work themselves to the bone for their entire lives, only to have everything taken away in a flash by the banks when they should be ready to retire in comfort and happiness. And as Brig. Gen. Francis X. Hummel said in The Rock, the situation is unacceptable.

Hence we have an understandable concern about a truly troublesome situation of many people in America, but it's a weak premise for the rest of the movie, possibly because 24 year old Estevez, as Wisdom, looks like he's 16 years old in the entire movie. Granted, his character is not meant to be much older than that, but there is a definite element of juvenile grandiose fantasy that renders much of the movie into something of a high school kid's dream of fame and a life of righteous crime.

Demi Moore, also 24 years old, plays the equally high school-ish love interest, oddly more ready to leave her boyfriend when he's in a persistent bad mood than she is when he runs out of a bank with a gun and jumps in her car and tells her to step on it with no warning or hesitation. The two ultimately become sort of a mesh of Bonnie and Clyde, Robin Hood, Mickey and Mallory, etc., as they cross the country holding up banks, but only for the purpose of burning lots of mortgage records, thereby erasing massive amounts of working class debt. Evidently mortgage companies and banks hold only a single solitary copy of debt records, and clearly there can't have been any computerized records, this is 1986 after all. Computers were like the size of Volkswagens back then, weren't they?

So here are a few reasons that the movie is just about unwatchable. First, there is the acting. I'll just specify the scene where Wisdom finally is able to talk to his parents after being on the run for several days. Very emotional, and quite possibly the least bearable scene in the film. Just stop, Emilio. This, as Roger Ebert might say, is a scene meant to be cut up and made into ukulele picks for the poor. Second, there's the pursuit. The FBI is chasing them, and at one point the head FBI agent worriedly hopes that they can get to them before they get to a certain bank. Would it not be prudent to send some agents straight to that bank to meet them? Thirdly, there's the simplicity of it all. Americans in debt, Wisdom comes in armed with an Uzi to save the day. Please. The last line in the film, more than any other line in any other movie I've ever seen, completely cancels itself out. It literally would have made no difference if the final line had been 'Why did we even make this movie?'

(spoilers) You can kind of track the progression of the writing, the ideas changing and evolving as the story develops. First there's the young kid trying to make some sense out of what he has to work with in his life, then the determined young man out to help his fellow man, then the Robin Hood, sequence, then Bonnie and Clyde after they tarnish their consciences, then the high speed pursuit as the police close in on them despite their own incompetence. The car chase is a great scene, it's a surprisingly well-made car chase for such a weak film, but the build up is heavily flawed. The scene where Demi kills the sheriff is a real forehead slapper.

On the run and with their faces plastered all over the TV and newspapers, Karen (Moore) walks into a convenience store and is shocked to find the sheriff walking in. So what does she do? She walks toward the door, stops behind him, and stares at him like a frightened deer, motionless until he can gradually recognize her. At one point, he even asks her, 'Are you okay, miss?' Sure, she was terrified, but I get so tired of scenes where you're sitting there yelling at the screen because all she has to do is keep walking. Had she just walked out, chances are the sheriff wouldn't have thought twice about it, and just kept right on living. But no, she had to pull out her gun and shoot him, and then jump into the car with her boyfriend so they can zoom down the highway to their deaths.

Sadly, once that car chase is over, it's all downhill. You can't really root for Wisdom to run around killing people, because he's not supposed to be a bad guy and is definitely not supposed to be a killer. Like his choices in life, he was supposed to have been DRIVEN to it by society. He had no choice, right? So why not return fire when they shoot Karen near the end of the film after they try to steal the Mustang? That jerk shot your girlfriend out of a helicopter, man! Shoot it down! Here's my theory – Estevez HAD to have known that his audience was going to want him to return fire, the FBI agent had long since been established as an antagonist. I'm sure Emilio wanted to put that in the script as well, a great way for them both to go out in a glorious hail of bullets, he probably just didn't have the budget to blow up a helicopter. So we get this scene in the football stadium. Why the cops went there in the first place I have no idea.

The movie knows what it wants to do and, thematically, it sets about to do it in a straight line. Unfortunately the characters change constantly, each one making ridiculous decisions out of the blue or to support the ridiculous decisions of the other ones, gradually changing into different people as a life of crime can do, but doing so through a series of wholly unbelievable scenes and events. And besides that, Demi had yet to make much of an impression, which surely must have worried her since she has a 10th grade education and doesn't have a lot to fall back on besides acting, and let's face it, Emilio had a rough introduction to writing and directing. Evidently he learned a lot of lessons from this movie before coming back in spectacular form in 1990.

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
fun for all of us who aren´t wise enough to hate it, 24 February 2001

Author: Jan Hrubin from Prague, Czech Republic

"Wisdom" is actually nowhere near as bad as its rep would suggest if you take it for what it is: a trashy B-movie which you should watch when you feel like laughing instead of thinking. In its cool pretty boy chic fashions, the movie is just so totally 80s and the various scenes where Estevez beats the cops on his trail, such as the dummy scene, are downright side splitting. I actually liked the "cop out" ending because I thought it was original for a movie of this sort and did not see it coming. Furthermore, this movie, for its low ambitions, has some surprisingly good camera work . My main reason, though, for liking this movie is the beautiful catchy soundtrack by Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo. Now, the bad ? Well, let´s just say that "Wisdom" never quite rises above the level of a lesser "Sledge Hammer" episode.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Beyond Implausible, 16 May 2007

Author: Don Alex Hixx (subcin@aol.com) from United States

The comments above have brought out many of the glaring flaws in this bizarre vanity piece from the 80s. Here's another one: how is it that he cant get a job because he's a "felon" (not even flipping burgers), but he can buy an Uzi right over the counter without a waiting period or a background check? Wouldn't his status as a "felon" show up when the gun shop owner checked his record? Or didn't they do that in 1985? The first scene in the flower shop with Emilio and Demi is a prime example of the pathetically juvenile nature of the dialogue, it sounds like this was something Emilio first dreamed up in junior high school (which he probably did), trying to write a script for an "outlaw" film that would also please his ultra-liberal dad. The mild sexual talk is immature and inexplicable. Demi: "You cant even get it up if there's a cool breeze going thru my bedroom". Huh?? And they call each other "babe" like two self-conscious 15 year olds pretending to be an adult couple. It's no wonder they broke up not longer after this film and moved on to other partners, after they grew up.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Oh Come On, 4 November 2000
Author: tfrizzell from United States

"Wisdom" is one of those strange films that is never sure what it wants to be. Young Emilio Estevez comes to the realization that he will never be a success so he decides to become a criminal, a criminal for the people. He aids farmers by destroying records in small-town banks, becoming a sort of Robin Hood figure. His girlfriend Demi Moore is also along for the ride. Obsessed detective William Allen Young will stop at nothing to bring the youths to justice, while the general public is indifferent until Moore has to shoot a police officer. Now the stakes get higher and everything will soon come to a head. Estevez shows his lack of writing and directing experience here. He has some good ideas, but never does execute them in effective ways. The fact that he is not much of an actor does not help either. Everyone else struggles with the direction and screenplay as well. All in all "Wisdom" is not terrible, but its ending basically takes away from the few good things about the film's first 105-minutes. 2 stars out of 5.

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3 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
I seriously don't think it was THAT bad, 20 December 2002
Author: Giggles82 from MI

I think alot of people knew from the get-go this movie wasnt going to be a award winning movie, but I don't think the movie was horrible. It certainly wasn't Emilio or Demi's finest work but for being the age Emilio was when he wrote and directed this movie, he didn't do that bad of a job. As far as the critics go with this movie: In my opinion they weren't going to be kind with this movie no matter how it good it was because of Demi and Emilio's "Brat pack" status.

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4 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Revenge of the 80's: Emilio Estevez Superstar., 31 January 2005

Author: Captain_Couth (sirjosephu@aol.com) from Sacramento, CA

Wisdom (1986) was a film that was written, directed, produced and starred Emilio Estevez. This movie was produced during the height of Emilio's career. He was also one of the youngest actors tin Hollywood to ever take on such as task. The end results are that of a novice film makers. In the end he bitten off more than he could chew.

The film is about a young wash out who can't do anything right. So he decides to become a sort of a modern day Robin Hood with his girlfriend/co-conspirator Demi Moore by his side. The young lovers hit the road and decide to make history.

Overall, it's an uneven production. The actors seemed to be unmotivated and the written is pretty run-of-the-mill. A good concept that's executed by mediocre hands. Estevez should have started out small before taking on such a big project. One the other hand I have to give him a big hand for pulling this one off.

Recommended for Emilio Estevez fans.

Factoids: Part of the movie was filmed in my hometown of Sacramento. I remembered all of the hub bub it created ten years ago. Charlie Sheen has a cameo as his "former" supervisor.

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Original (before Fight Club), 4 October 2006

Author: selfplex from Baltimore, MD, USA

For its time, and given the youth and inexperience of Estevez as a director, this is a highly original and entertaining film. I write this comment twenty years after its release. I especially like it when Estevez (Wisdom) buys the Uzi, and has no idea what he's doing. This is a great contrast to so many action flicks where the players are experts in weapons, explosives, battle tactics, etc., because they're former Special Forces guys.

The supporting actors, though few are known to me, actually perform admirably, including one we know well-- Charlie Sheen. We're tempted to ask, "What ever happened" to Emilio, but tends to forget he did a great body of work when many of us were still children.

I generously give it an eight, in context.

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1 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
crazy but my kind of crazy, 20 May 2004

Author: mm-39 from Winnipeg

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Spoiler I was watching this film years back, young and unemployed. This is a hard to accept, especially when other close too you call you a bum. Emlio's character felt like a loser also. This drives him on a cray trial. Unblevable, yet crazy, but likable. I could relate, and becomes a robber hood. Then we find out it's all a dream, which makes a logical conclusion. My wife says hey Mike this is just like you. Very 80's with the FBI guy who understands etc. I like the part where the hero is on the vistors stands in the ending. I won't take this film too seriously, if you don't either? Killing some time while I down load Black Out game from the Dawn of the Dead movie sight, and thought about reviewing this film. Watch it. 6 out of 10. I wonder if they show this one on TBS.

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