The Bonfire of the Vanities

Rating:
Summary: Not as good as the book, but passible
Review: Yes, Tom Hanks was miscast as McCoy, and the film lacked the bite the book had, but come on-most of us see movies to be entertained, and on these merits, this movie was entertaining enough. The highlight of the movie was Morgan Freeman, a fair, no-nonsense judge who just happened to be black.

Rating:
Summary: IS this good? Yes, with an if or No, with a but.
Review: Your opinion of this film will completly hinge on whether you've read the book. On its own, this is not a terrible film. I saw it before I read the novel, shortly after it came out, and I thought that it was a bit of a lark - nothing special but not meriting the excoriating criticism it received. It had its moments and at times was rather funny. BUT, a few years later I read the novel. Now, I know that film adaptations have a hard time living up to the book and some allowances must be made and some tolerance shown. This film goes beyond the pale in trying that tolerance. It is the blueprint for ruining a great story when putting it to screen. At best, one could make the point that there is an irony, one everyone should be aware of by now, that Holloywood comes off as the real bonfire of the vanities, doing all it can to make an opening weekend cashcow while scarificing the entire spirit of the novel.
To be fair, it would be next to impossible to do justice to the story in 2-3 hours so the whole enterprise was pretty much doomed from the start. If you are at all interested in the story, please don't watch the movie. You will be cheating yourself.
Think of it this way: imagine the first time you tasted scotch someone gave you Johnny Walker Red. Not bad, but not great. That is the movie. Now, reading the book is like getting a dram of JW Blue. Fantastic, and only now do you realize that the slop you tried earlier is a very, very pale and spectre thin version of the real stuff. There is simply no comparison, just the coincidence of names and settings and plot (to an extent). It's really too bad, because it likely stopped someone else, like the BBC or PBS, from doing justice to one of the greatest novels of the last 20 years.