The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)

Wall Street trader Tom Hanks gets lost driving girlfriend Melanie Griffith home from the airport and a series of events ends with her driving over a Black teenager. On the other side of town, down on his luck journalist Bruce Willis uses the story, which becomes a rallying point for district attorney F. Murray Abraham’s attempts to improve his image in the Black community, to get in good with his editor. I know this film has a bad reputation, but I had no idea how deserved it was. Every single one of the main characters is horrendously miscast in the film that it’s hard to believe anyone thought it would work. I’ve never read the source material, but for such a success, I can’t imagine its plot is as muddied and tone so incredibly uneven as this film turns out to be.