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227 reviews in total

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68 out of 101 people found the following review useful:
Okay, then..., 6 September 2000

Author: Mister-6 from United States

This is one of those surreal experiences that make you wonder whether or not you laughed at what you saw or what you THOUGHT you had seen. Of course, being concocted by Joel and Ethan Coen makes it even more surreal.

As "repeat offender" H. I. McDonnough, Nicolas Cage creates yet another strange, offbeat character that gets under your skin for days after. After returning to the same prison time after time under the eye of Officer Ed (Holly Hunter), he goes straight and they get married, planning to have a big family. It is only then, he finds that Ed is a "barren, rocky place".

So, what's a couple to do?

This is where the "Arizona" of the title comes in, when they steal one of the quintuplets of the Arizona family. Naturally, the father (Wilson) goes all out to find the culprits, even enlisting the aid of a "tracker" (Cobb), who is kind of an existential bounty hunter with a good nose.

From this deceptively simple story line, the Coens create a dreamscape that is mesmerizing, serpentine, loaded with all matter of visual input, deft one-liners and characters that are so off-the-wall that it's hard to forget them and the situations they get into.

Coen Brother stalwart John Goodman plays yet another flaky loon - this time an escaped con - who, along with his little brother (Forsythe) complain that the prison "had no more to offer them".

Of course, the chases, fight scenes and getaway scenes are elaborate, well-choreographed and exciting, as well as funny. How could they not be? This whole movie is one huge snowball rolling down the side of a mountain, growing larger and rolling faster as it reaches the end of its trip.

But to try and explain this movie is an exercise in futility; you'd be better off explaining Kierkegaard to a room full of second-graders. You just have to see it yourself. If your sense of humor is a bit on the dry side and you love fancy camera work and Fellini-esque characters, it's your kind of movie.

Trust me.

Ten stars and a complimentary pack of Huggies for "Raising Arizona", the best Dadaist head trip film with kidnapped babies, exploding bunnies and Frances McDormand in the desert you'll ever find...that has a fight in a trailer.

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46 out of 77 people found the following review useful:
Absolutely brilliant! Possibly the Coens brothers funniest movie., 15 August 2003
Author: Infofreak from Perth, Australia

I always say that my favourite Coen brothers movie is the last one I watched. A slight exaggeration, but as they have had very few real misses in their career it's easy to forget just how great most of their movies are. For me 'Raising Arizona' ties with 'The Big Lebowski' as their single most entertaining movie, and Arizona is arguably the funnier of the two if you are looking at sheer belly laughs. This movie is the Coen's most cartoonish and shows that they learned a lot from their involvement in Sam Raimi's 'The Evil Dead' and 'Crimewave'. The movie is full of fun, clever touches and infectious energy. It just never lets up. Calling a movie "a roller coaster ride" is a cliche, but it's a perfect description for this. The opening pre-credit sequence has more packed into it than most movies do in their complete running time! Nicholas Cage has recently got sidetracked making dumb action movies but back in the 80s and early 90s he was one of the most interesting and adventurous leading men in Hollywood, making unusual movies like 'Birdy', this, 'Vampire's Kiss' and 'Wild At Heart'. 'Adaptation' is a step back in the right direction for him. I hope he continues in this vein instead of say, 'Con Air 2'. Cage is just terrific as H.I. and I haven't enjoyed Holly Hunter as much in any other movie. Together they make one of the best on screen couples in many a moon. The supporting cast are all fantastic, especially John Goodman and William Forsythe as H.I.'s prison buddies. The psycho biker played by "Tex" Cobb is a also a brilliant touch. There are so many memorable bits in 'Raising Arizona' I could be here all day pointing them out. Just see for yourself. There were lots of lousy movies made in the 1980s, the Spielberg/Lucas/Simpson/Bruckheimer/John Hughes decade that dumbed down mainstream movies forever, but there were also thankfully some wonderfully inspired ones like this, 'Blue Velvet', 'Brazil', 'RoboCop', 'Repo Man', 'Eating Raoul', 'Beetlejuice', and 'The King Of Comedy'.

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23 out of 35 people found the following review useful:
Reminiscent of the humorous two-dimensional anarchy of Warner Bros. cartoons…, 11 December 2005

Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

For all the visual flair and deft performances on display in their films, the Coens' greatest virtue lies in writing… In terms of cheerful stories, witty dialog and the creation of a coherent, plausible fantasy world peopled by vivid characters, their ability to work original and entertaining variations on a genre indicates well for the future…

Opening with a brilliant pre-credits monologue, "Raising Arizona" tells of an incompetent, compulsive petty criminal's love for his prison warder: married but infertile, the couple kidnap a baby, whose tycoon father hires a crazed biker to find and kill the culprits… A surreal, slapstick satire, it takes intense pleasure in exciting plotting, showy and cheap colors, and hilarious screwball characters…

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31 out of 53 people found the following review useful:
Hysterical, each time I see it, 24 April 2006

Author: ddmcc from United States

A lot of things come together to make this film highly enjoyable; acting, writing, music, pace, directing... It's over-the-top fun. It took me several viewings before it sunk in that the film's base story is about child kidnapping; which is an extraordinarily serious crime. But this film makes you enjoy every minute so it's easy to forget the seriousness of the base story.

While I'm not a fan of Nicholas Cage, I thought this was a perfect vehicle for him. Holly Hunter is always excellent, IMHO. Their attention to detail in crafting their characters was on point and thorough.

"Well alright then." :)

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29 out of 50 people found the following review useful:
A Coen Classic, 31 July 2004
Author: caspian1978 from Boston, MA

The Coen Brothers first "masterpiece" black comedy was a 1987 surprise hit that raised the bar in the comedy genre. Future Academy Award winners Cage and Hunter star in what may be one of the most original stories ever to come out of Arizona. Goodman shows the world he can be funny as the misunderstood and somewhat crazy escaped convict. Cage and Hunter have so much love to give, they steal a baby from Mr. Arizona himself. A modern day (80's) fantasy that chooses an interesting setting to tell its tale. The hilarious innocence is non-stop as Raising Arizona showcases relationship, friendship, vanity, ignorance, and the search for peace and forgiveness. Who knows....maybe it was Utah?

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Brilliant oddball comedy, 4 July 2009

Author: Sandcooler from Belgium

There are really few directors that are as consistent as the Coen brothers. Their strange sense of humour just works in every movie they make, and it's extremely fun and addictive. With that said, it's difficult to decide which of their movies is the best, but this one is a worthy contender. It's incredibly outrageous, wild and crazy, but at the same time it's close and heart-warming. It has a very surreal look, yet the emotional scenes still look very genuine, which is quite an achievement. The characters are also vintage Coen, they're all offbeat and weird, but that just raises more sympathy for them. It also helps that they all express themselves through some razor-sharp dialogues. I could barely make out the lines because I was too busy laughing at the previous lines, you wonder where these keep coming from. This movie just isn't like anything I've ever seen. It's astoundingly funny in all its weirdness.

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7 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Raising Arizona: Devoid of Humour, 15 January 2011

Author: Baron Ronan Doyle (imagiking@gmail.com) from Ireland

In the run up to the release of the eagerly anticipated True Grit, I thought it time to catch up with those Coen Brothers films I had yet to see. Made in their formative years, Raising Arizona is the second Coen film, following up the largely decent Blood Simple.

In and out of prison for armed robbery a number of times over a period of some years, repeat offender "Hi" McDunnough begins to gradually fall for police photographer "Ed". After Hi vows to reform, they marry and decide to have children. Upon discovering the infertility of Ed, they opt to steal one of five babies born to local furniture salesman Nathan Arizona.

Any film which numbers Nicolas Cage among its cast is a big risk for me. The man is one of those actors whose presence almost always signifies a terrible film to come. The combination of this bearing the Coen stamp and being the first Cage film I'd seen since Adaptation—in which he is, dare I say it, bearable—assuaged my fears and allowed me to sit back with hope intact. The film's opening is rapid in pace, though not too much of a fault: it's a little distracting, and feels a tad rushed, but it's no serious problem. The humour—for this is a comedy, in case you're unaware—starts relatively strong, an extended scene in which Hi attempts to control the quintuplets whilst choosing which to steal particularly humorous. Had the credits rolled immediately thereafter, I would've been happy. But they don't, alas. What follows is just over an hour of completely misguided humour, bare caricatures, and that most hated of "comedy" clichés: the parody of deep-South life. To call it an uncomfortable viewing experience would be an understatement, my eyes trained on the DVD player "time elapsed" display as my fingers drummed on the chair, waiting for it all to end. Other than in the first half hour, I genuinely don't think as much as a brief chuckle escaped my mouth. The characters are irritating, underdeveloped, uninteresting, and uninvolving (the bounty hunter biker caused me no end of sighs and wails of despair). I now remember, if you'll permit me something of a tangential thought, that I did in fact laugh twice: once each for Frances McDormand and John Goodman, both of whom are amongst the painfully few good things the film has to offer. Though that said, the scene wherein Goodman emerges from mud vexed me with its silly shouting. As if I wasn't disappointed and disgusted enough with the film as a whole, to return to things, the ending is utterly revolting garbage which attempts, in a most upsetting way, to sanitise what has gone before with paint-by-numbers sentiment. Simply infuriating.

Raising Arizona, you may have noticed, was not quite for me. Almost entirely devoid of humour, characters, or any shred of likability, it is a welcome edition to the Nic Cage canon. I think it possible that I'd have hated this less were it not a Coen Brothers film—not, that is to say, that I'm the kind of person who decided that the brothers were the saviours of American cinema after seeing No Country for Old Men—simply that all I'd seen by them prior to this had been at least quite quite good. In summary, do try to avoid this.

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15 out of 25 people found the following review useful:
pure lunacy, 14 October 1998
Author: Jeff (spoonjef@aol.com) from L.A. California

Pure lunacy is what Raising Arizona is. It's got everything you could ask for in a film; kidnapping, jailbreaks, Hell's Angels, explosions and guns, guns guns. Nic Cage is great in the role of a very befuddled conveniance store robber who falls in love with Holly Hunter's Ed. Throw in John Goodman and William Forsythe as a couple of car stealing, bank robbing brothers and you got yourself scenes that will make you giggle when you think back about them. The entire state of Arizona seems trigger happy in the Coen's eyes. Clerks, cops, and crooks pull out firearms and let loose like the finale of the 1812 Overture. Plus, where else can you hear really good yodeling?

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28 out of 53 people found the following review useful:
"They GOT more than they can handle!", 30 August 2005

Author: Billie from United States

"Raising Arizona" is one of what I consider to be the five instantly classic films by the team of Ethan and Joel Coen, the others being "Blood Simple", "Fargo", "Oh Brother Where Are Thou", and "The Big Lebowski".

But "Raising Arizona" is my personal favorite, and probably the most quotable films I have ever seen, with some of the best dialogue ever written for film.

The story in brief: H.I. (Nicholas Cage) and "Ed" (Holly Hunter, in one of my favorite roles of hers) portray, respectively, an ex-con and a cop who meet when he keeps getting arrested for robbing convenience stores. They fall in love, get married, decide that "there is just too much love" between them, and they need a "critter to share it with". Upon finding that "Edwina's insides were a rocky place" where H.I.'s "seed could find no purchase", they try to adopt, but are turned down because of H.I.'s record. Then they read in the newspaper about local unpainted furniture storeowner Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), owner of "Unpainted Arizona", and his wife having quintuplets as a result of fertility pills, and who joke that "They got more than they can handle". The couple hatch a plan to take one of the babies and raise it as their own.

What results is an ongoing, fast-paced, hilarious set of misadventures, complicated by the appearance of a ruthless, heartless outlaw named Leonard Smalls (Randall "Tex" Cobb) Nathan Arizona hires to find the missing baby, and two felon friends from H.I.'s past (John Goodman and William Forsythe), who make a childbirth-like escape from prison. Sam McMurray (the smarmy dad in "Drop Dead Gorgeous") is H.I.'s....smarmy boss, Glen. Frances McDormand (real-life spouse of Joel Coen, and star of other Coen films such as "Blood Simple" and "Fargo") is his excitable wife Dot. M. Emmet Walsh ("Blood Simple") has a scenery-chewing cameo role as H.I.'s talkative co-worker.

When Ed finally opens up her 5'2" can of Southern-fried whup-ass, throwing her badge to the dirt, striding towards Leonard Smalls as she bellows with all her might, "Gimme back that baby, you warthog from HELL!!!" I always fling my arms up and shout "You go girl! Kick his ass!"

And the way Hunter cries is hilarious.

Holly Hunter was great in this role, as one would expect. She's a very talented actress, in both serious and comedic roles.

Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter made a great on screen couple, Cage with his hair standing out in every direction, looking like a hapless, browbeaten puppy half of the time, and Hunter as his diminutive firecracker of a wife who loves him and tries to keep him honest (oh yeah except for that little kidnapping excursion).

I could go on and on about this film but suffice to say that so far I haven't met anyone who didn't find "Raising Arizona" hilarious. And as any great Coen brothers film, it has a certain mythic quality that's hard to describe, but is present all of of the brothers' best efforts. When I was single, I often used Coen brothers films as a barometer of sorts for prospective boyfriends. For instance, I remember seeing "Fargo" on a first date, and when we came out of the theater, the guy (whose name I have since forgotten anyway) remarked "Huh, I didn't think much of that", while I was thinking how blown away I was by the film! I immediately thought to myself "So much for him! This relationship won't last long."

For more great Coen comedy, check out "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" (2000), which is loosely based on Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey". Another great Coen comedy is "The Big Lebowski" (1998), which also includes my favorite singer/songwriter Aimee Mann in a brief cameo, and boasts a cult following that has resulted in an annual "Lebowskifest" for fans of the film.

"Blood Simple" (1984) is probably my favorite film noir modern-day classic tale of lust and betrayal, and is my personal second-favorite Coen brothers film. "Fargo" (1996), which won the Screen writing Oscar, and an Oscar for Frances McDormand, is another must-see Coen classic.

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4 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
A Coen movie I do not like..., 31 March 2002

Author: max.vermeij from Leiden, The Netherlands

... nearly as much as I like the other Coen movies I've seen (I have not yet seen Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy). Raising Arizona tries way too hard to be funny, sometimes in a Benny-Hill-kind of way, e.g. with Cage running around, dogs chasing him. I don't get it. Still, the movie's got a few genuinely humorous moments.

Considering the fact that almost all comments for this one are positive, I checked Raising Arizona's average rating of 7.6 against the ratings for other Coen movies. I was somewhat relieved to find that this movie has the lowest (average) rating of the Coen movies I've seen up to now.

A 6 out of 10.

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