Tom Hanks’ Worst Movie Is Free to Watch Online If You Dare

On February 7, 1497, Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola and his followers burned objects of art and pieces of literature in the public square of Florence, Italy. Decrying these objects as distractions that turn the people’s attention from God, they called the pyre “the Bonfire of the Vanities.”

The phrase has been used time and again throughout history, including the title of a 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. But never has it been more fitting than when applied to the 1990 film adaptation of that same book, an infamous disaster starring Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman, and Tom Hanks.

The 1497 bonfire is lost to history, viewable only in our imaginations. 1990’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, however, is now streaming free on YouTube, one of 31 films the Warner Bros has made available. It’s quite…the watch if you have some time over the weekend.

Directed by Brian De Palma, the mad genius behind Carrie and Mission: Impossible, The Bonfire of the Vanities stars Hanks stock trader Sherman McCoy, who becomes a figure of public disdain after he and his illicit lover, married Southern Belle Maria Ruskin (Griffith), hit and kill a Black youth during a night on the town. Despite McCoy’s attempts to hide it, the incident comes to the attention of down-on-his luck reporter Peter Fallow (Willis), who turns the event into a cause celebre for local politicians.

As you might guess from that description, De Palma and screenwriter Michael Cristofer lean into the delicious cynicism of Wolfe’s story. Although Bonfire directs most of its ire toward the rich people in McCoy’s social circle, no one comes off looking good. Everyone uses the death of an innocent teen as their own ticket to the big time, hoping to cut McCoy down to size and install themselves at the top of the heap. For his part, McCoy (and Ruskin) try to find a way to capitalize on the controversy.

Movies don’t necessarily need likable characters to be good. But the ever-excessive De Palma stacks the deck against himself by fully indulging in his visual flourishes. A long oner follows a delirious McCoy as he celebrates down a hallway. De Palma takes every opportunity to do a split-diopter image, in which objects in the foreground and the background are both in focus at the same time, creating a dizzying effect. And then there’s the infamous, single, seconds-long shot of a plane landing that cost $80,000 to achieve.

Between the movie’s unnecessary $47 million budget and its $15 million box office return, all of which gets documented in the unprecedented behind-the-scenes book The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon, The Bonfire of the Vanities came to represent its own theme, itself an object of hubris and excess that distracted from the purity of the moral point it wanted to make.

Unsurprisingly, audiences at the time hated the movie, which still has a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes. But one of critics’ chief complaints is exactly why people should check it out today.

Bonfires‘ first viewers found the movie woefully miscast, complaining that the wisecracking, self-confident Willis couldn’t pull off the cynical self-hatred of the British reporter that Wolfe created. Freeman plays his usual voice of comfort and reason as Judge White, but the original character fit Wolf’s cynical worldview, making Freeman’s warmth stand out even more.

The biggest problem by far was asking Hanks to play a soulless stockbroker. Now, to be clear, 1990 Hanks was not yet America’s dad. He was still three years away from Philadelphia, four years away from Forrest Gump, and 23 years from breaking everyone’s heart at the end of Captain Phillips. Heck, he hadn’t even declared that there’s no crying in baseball yet.

Still, Hanks could not help but add a humanity and likability absolutely absent from Wolfe’s rendition of the character. So when De Palma asked him to embody a cold and uncaring broker, someone for whom the lows of life means nothing more than the chance to rise or sink in status, Hanks flails to find the right gear. He’s bug-eyed and manic, somehow even more over-the-top than De Palma’s camera.

As you might expect from this description, The Bonfire of the Vanities is not a good movie. It is, however, a fascinating movie. It’s not a movie that you would watch for fun, but you might watch it to get insight on blockbuster follies and the evolution of Hanks’s career.

In other words, The Bonfire of the Vanities is the perfect movie to watch for free on YouTube, instead of throwing away your money, like it’s something to be burned in the public square.

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