"The Bonfire of the Vanities" is a live-action cartoon by Brian De Palma, his first non-violent movie in quite some time (his hits include "The Untouchables," "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill").
Looking at the film on its own terms, the main problem is that it's simply too broadly played — every character as caricature.
Tom Hanks plays a New York stock wizard with power and wealth, a beautiful, if vapid, wife (Kim Cattrall) and an equally beautiful and even more vapid mistress (Melanie Griffith).
One night Hanks and Griffith take a wrong turn and wind up in the South Bronx, where they accidentally hit a black youth who lands in the hospital in a coma. A black reverend teams up with the youth's mother to call for justice and soon it has become a racial tempest polarizing the city, with the bigoted Jewish D.A. (unbilled F. Murray Abraham) demanding Hanks be hung.
Meanwhile, a down-on-his luck, boozy tabloid reporter (Bruce Willis) pumps up the story, making it much more than it is — and sees his own star rise.
After screaming histrionics, racist epithets in every direction and more broadly played stereotypes than one film can hold, the black judge presiding over the case (Morgan Freeman) offers a penultimate speech about love and justice. Then the film closes on a cynical one-liner from Willis. (And it is symptomatic of the film's annoying superiority that, in the end, the injured youth's condition is never resolved.)
De Palma's distracting camera tricks, including his trademark circling shots and loads of fisheye lens closeups, seem designed to botch rather than serve the material, and the only players who come off well are Willis and Freeman.
"The Bonfire of the Vanities" is a real mess, and fans of the book will be even more disappointed than the rest of the audience.
It is rated R for profanity, vulgarity, sex, partial nudity and violence.