The Bonfire of the Vanities
Not quite as bad as its 'one of the worst movies ever made' reputation. Not spectacularly bad, but bad. Supposedly a fable about the 1980's Greed is Good mentality, Sherman McCoy (Hanks) has everything as a legendary Wall St trader, but loses it all because of one wrong number and one wrong turn. The script lent so much weight to these two incidents that the moral can only have been – the more you have, the easier it is to lose.
He and lover (Griffith) hit and injure a black kid. Mayoral wannabe DA (Abraham) decides to plug the case for all it's worth to project the right image to his electorate, supported by a charismatic and media savvy Reverend. With so many powerful parties desperate to have him go down for the crime, McCoy starts to unravel, and a race is on trying to outwit his adversaries (including his former lover) and do the right thing. Meanwhile, down on his luck reporter Fallow (Willis) sees the whole thing as his ticket to the top.
It's hard to decide if the story was about McCoy and Fallow swapping places (and how easily you can rise and fall in the modern materialist world), or about simply being decent – the speech given by Freeman as the presiding judge at the end of the film seemed to be the reason for his entire character).
But it's a mish-mash of characters with ill-defined identities and motivations, has too many messages and morals that aren't explored or delivered clearly enough, and the end result seems to be a bubble and squeak pattie containing bits of Wall Street, Moonlighting and Fatal Attraction.