Rating: 
Summary: A Feel-Bad Movie
Review: One star, because that's the minimum. Another star just for my profound respect for Mr. Scorsese's name.If you've thought a director as great as Martin Scorsese could not shoot a film without a plot, you're welcomed to watch this rambling, mumbling, down-and-out "docudrama" about ... what else, how terrible the life of a night-shift paramedic and ambulance driver in NYC is (surprise!). You are also welcomed to watch this sorry product if you've ever considered driving a night-shift ambulance in NYC as a glamorous job. Nick Cage and John Goodman wasted their talents just for Scorsese's sake driving around the rainy mean streets of the Big Apple for two hours among ghosts, hookers, suicidal maniacs, nightmares, and basically the assorted filth and rejects of NYC while smoking profusely like the proverbial chimney. Patricia Arquette should've saved her razor sharp acting to another movie worthy of her talent. And the only way I can explain to myself the presence of appropriately-volatile Tom Berenger in this flick is that, just like Cage and Goodman, he also couldn't say "no" when he got that phone call from Mr. Scorsese. Just as there are "feel-good movies", this goes to show that when you are a famous director you are entitled to shoot a feel-bad movie as well. Recommended for those who are trying to bring themselves down on any day or night of the week.
Rating:
Summary: A Feel-Bad Movie
Review: One star, because that's the minimum. Another star just for my profound respect for Mr. Scorcese's name. If you've thought a director as great as Martin Scorcese could not shoot a film without a plot, you're welcomed to watch this rambling, mumbling, down-and-out "docudrama" about ... what else, how terrible the life of a night-shift paramedic and ambulance driver in NYC is (surprise!). You are also welcomed to watch this sorry product if you've ever considered driving a night-shift ambulance in NYC as a glamorous job. Nick Cage and John Goodman wasted their talents just for Scorcese's sake driving around the rainy mean streets of the Big Apple for two hours among ghosts, hookers, suicidal maniacs, nightmares, and basically the assorted filth and rejects of NYC while smoking profusely like the proverbial chimney. And the only way I can explain to myself the presence of Tom Berenger in this flick is that, just like Cage and Goodman, he also couldn't say "no" when he got that phone call from Mr. Scorcese. Just as there are "feel-good movies", this goes to show that when you are a famous director you are entitled to shoot a feel-bad movie as well. Recommended for those who are trying to bring themselves down on any day or night of the week.
Rating: 
Summary: a hell of a book made into a hell of a movie
Review: Scorsese takes Connelly's work and makes perhaps the best EMS movie ever. Nicolas Cage's performance as a burned-out medic gave me chills, having seen that look in the mirror more than once over the years.
Rating: 
Summary: Fatally Boring
Review: This has to be the worst Scorcese film I have ever seen: a real sleeper. So tediously boring I stopped watching it half-way through: I haven't cared to watch it since. There's no plot to the story and Nicholas Cage just talks on and on and on in a bland monotone. Nothing in this film is original: you can watch the same types of stories for free on "ER" or old re-runs of "Emergency 51." Rent it if you must: buy at your own peril.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome movie, but..........
Review: "Bringing Out The Dead" was an awesome movie, but..... It had NO story line. Nothing. Nothing was building up, you don't anticipate anything, you just WAIT WAIT WAIT for something to happen. Since when did medics smoke and drink in an ambulance? NEVER! Okay, but made medics look bad......
Rating:
Summary: Quite bland
Review: Ok, i really didn't see anything great about this film. The storyline, if it can be called that, is really weak. It's one of those stream-of-consciousness films which are very hit or miss. I personally thought this film was incredibly boring, and it just goes on forever...and not in a good way. Nic Cage is a good actor but even he can't save this turkey.
Rating:
Summary: WORST CAGE MOVIE EVVEEEEEEER!
Review: Nicholas Cage always seem to star in great movies.. And this is the exception. We actually sat through 45 minutes through this movie and decided to walk out! .. It was boring and the storyline is pointless. He is an EMT working in New York and its all so pointless. Its like the director decided to jus shoot a movie without a script or storyline and go 'the heck wit it, lets see where this is going'.. And I can honestly say it went nowhere. I knew a lot of people who tried to rent his movie and decided to return it and get their money back or try to say that the dvd was broken so they can choose another one.. I bet Nicholas Cage would never put this credit in his resume. This movie is jus sooo awful! IT ranks up there on my list of the worst movies I ever saw in my life!!
Rating: 
Summary: Just a cool Cage movie
Review: This 1999 drama might be one of Nicolas Cage's most under appreciated films. Cage stars as Frank Pierce, who's a guy who has been working with the dead for most of his life. He's had enough with his job and does everything he can to get fired, except quit. And with the shortage of ambulance drivers his boss vows to keep him driving till he's dead (or something like that). The thing about Frank is that he can't sleep. It's not that he can't, he just doesn't want to. Being an ambulance driver he's obviously lost many patients over the years, and when he sleeps, he pictures them in his mind. It's like he's in a 'slump' for saving peoples' lives, sort of like going 0-for-20 in basketball and fouling out in the first half. But then when an older patient is brought back to life (for a while) by Cage and his partner Larry Verber (John Goodman), he tries to see that this one patient makes it. He does this through his feelings for Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette). She's a sad depressed girl who'd not spoken with her father (the man rescued) in a long time; and she's a bit testy. Although the movie seems to be filled with death and suffering, it still manages to give life, in a sense, to Cage's character and his future. He goes through many depressive nights with different drivers/partners; that being the for mentioned Goodman along with Ving Rhames (who chimes in with some funny lines and good comedy) and Tom Sizemore. There's also an appearance by pop-singer Marc Anthony, who has a small role as a drug addict. Martin Scorsese, who's brought us such Mafia/mob hits as "Goodfellas" and "Casino", gives a new kind of film. It's hard to categorize this movie as a certain drama. Some parts would qualify as comedy, some as horror, and even some as action. But in the end, it's basically a drama; a well-balanced one though. You must realize in watching this movie, that it is not a feel-good movie and it won't (necessarily) make you smile. But if you're one of those people who likes the twisted and dramatic movies, this one's is for you. Nicolas Cage puts in a vibrant and shocking performance that'll keep you entertained, I have no doubt about that. This movie is close to around 3.25 stars or so; the only reason it didn't get more is because of its ending. I think Scorsese could have finished it off with a little more of a bang. Nevertheless, it's a good movie.
Rating:
Summary: Closer to reality than you realize
Review: First, I have to say that I am an EMT who works the third shift in a large US city. While this is definitely a fictional work, let me tell you that this film is much closer to reality than you realize. What strikes me is the characters. I have lived and worked with people just like everyone that Nicholas Cage's character encounters on the job. The "I'll fire you next week, I promise" theme is absolutely real, I am not kidding, that IS my boss talking. The partners...John Goodman the "normal guy," Ving Rhames the funny partner who wants to go look at hookers, Tom Sizemore the partner who wants to fight a mental patient...I know people exactly like this!! The story about the critically ill patient and his family and getting a bit too involved--it's not quite real to life but I can identify very strongly with it. And yes, they're ALWAYS on the top floor and you have to carry all your gear up ALL those stairs!! Finally, the scene where Sizemore just takes a baseball bat to the ambulance, I've always wanted to do that just once. ;)
So for me, this is like a home movie...I tell people if they want to know what it is like to be an EMT, it is part Emergency!, part Mother Juggs & Speed, and part Bringing Out the Dead. Buy it, get into its dark philosophy, enjoy the film.
Rating:
Summary: One Foot in the Grave
Review: Frank Pierce has worked so long with the dying and the dead, that he is ready to join them. Not that he is suicidal, per se. But while being both supremely self-absorbed yet entirely oblivious to himself, he physically appears to enter their realm, and spiritually connects to them in an insomniac's dreamworld. The dead haunt his thoughts generally; but a recent, peculiarly melancholy death manifests itself as a silent yet sharp and accusatory ghost of a young woman, Rosa, seen clearly but briefly in his approaching madness. But it cannot be said that Frank slides into the grave; rather, he oscillates between it and the gory bursts of Real Life hurled on him by his job, a paramedic in the street-drug war frontier of early-90's Upper Manhattan/Harlem. Geographically, and photographically, his trajectory is channeled along the streets, the lights of nightshift New York cascading through three wet winter evenings. His vehicle strobes the city, fitfully illuminating his alcoholic nocturnal transformations, in the company of three separate partners (one each night). These ostensibly "real live" characters are nonetheless more evanescent, and insane, than the hallucinations--a Dickensian trio of gargoyles, each with his own lunatic message. The Partner of the First Night preaches simpleminded survival. Do your job. Focus on your gut. Get promoted. Look past the dead. Ignore them. This last, crucial piece is impossible for Frank. The Partner of the Second Night markets a locally-produced ersatz spirituality while bristling with apathetic cynicism, and displays a pathetically marked willingness to join Frank in a drink. Finally, he must admit that the dead stalk him as well, pulling him into a similarly distilled pit. No hope there. The Partner of the Third Night, most insane of all, appears to ask the blunt question: if you really must destroy something, Frank, why does it have to be yourself? His wide-eyed grin brimming over with violence, it leads him to lash destruction at random angles. While promising distraction from Rosa, Frank's core humanity cannot abide by it, and he must work to save a badly beaten victim of this Third Partner's rage. These tales weave like black moldy ivy around the central story pillar: Frank's tentative, embryonic redemption through a (this time, living) young woman, Mary, the daughter of a dying neighborhood man. Actually he's a heart-attack victim, fighting to die, that Frank brought to "Misery"--the nickname of the hospital he delivers to, shortened from "Our Lady of Mercy/[Misery]". After a drug-induced REM-state recapitulation of Rosa's awkward death at his hands, Frank resolves on salvation, and is awarded a close encounter with Rosa's ghost, beckoning him back towards his life, which appears to be tumbling together with Mary's, like two shirts in a dryer. Adapted from a novel by Joe Connelly. The book's maudlin explanatory underpinnings--the product of a stubbornly diseased marriage, Frank has recently suffered being dumped by his cute and exasperated wife--are here replaced with a brooding mystery about just what is Frank's problem. However, its spiritually arresting ending makes Scorcese's version look like a PSA against suicide. Martin Scorcese directs like a master, what can you say? He excises the slender flaws in Connelly's beautifully depressing text and fleshes it out with an idiosyncratic visual language. While he commits the grave Hollywood sin of eschewing the author's bitter end, he still delivers a thoughtfully ambiguous closing. Nicholas Cage is perfectly cast as Frank, in what appears to be a performance filmed after Cage had been awake for eight straight days. The combination of photography and Cage's clear facial evidence of rampaging cognitive decay produces a series of Lon Chaney, Jr.-styled mutations. Patricia Arquette stoutly stands as Mary, an oddity in the setting. But I can personally attest to the oddities that bloomed in late 20th century American urban civilization. John Goodman, in a shockingly natural performance, nonetheless acts with precision as Partner One. Ving Rhames provides much-needed comic relief as Partner Two.
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