As every single other Scorcese movie, this one is strangely as well as massively overrated.

I'll make this simple: if you're not sucked into the senseless, remote action going on there's nothing left but the weakest and most pernicious and ambiguous moral at the end.

The film is completely random in every possible way: the worst way being at its core, it is nihilistic and unnecessarily bleak. The entire first part of the film for instance with Cybill Shepherd serves no purpose in the storyline but is rather a fully interchangeable/disposable introduction to the film and means to merely convey the notion Deniro's character longs for emotional connection and companionship, but they could've replaced that entire part with a number of other ones in a way that wouldn't shake up the story at all.

There's no explanation or significant reason for the turn of events and the change in texture and atmosphere of the film as Deniro's character becomes exceedingly more extreme: just as everything in this darn thing, conclusions are jumped to and never given a prior development. Things just happen, because the movie-makers (writer and director) were disturbingly inept at their jobs of creating coherent structure and developing a plot and its various ideas.

Some scenes are just purely random (why the attempted assassination of Palantine ?), added to the just as unnecessary violence and this here is only a 'personal nightmare' for the viewer, not Deniro's character and what not.

Philosophically bleak, not dark or haunting just bleak, as in stupid and morally violent, and pernicious. Influential ? This couldn't influence a hair in my nose. Terrible cinema, terrible story telling, terrible everything. Okay dialogue, De Niro's good...

2/10.