I always liked Dustin Hoffman. I've never known anyone else who could play a broader range of characters. From autistic sevant ("I'm an excellent driver""uh oh, only three minutes til Wapner"), to actor in drag ("you want me to play taller, you want me to play shorter, you want me to play a tomato"), to playboy charmer ("you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson?"), to tough, little, and determined ("I'm walkin here!"), to firm but loving father ("take one bite of that ice cream and you're in big trouble young man!"). Dustin is nothing short of an acting genius.In hero, Dustin plays, well just that. He is Bernie Leplant. In some ways, Bernie is a hero. In other ways, he has hardly been judged father of the year. Not according to his ex Joan Cusack. First of all, Bernie is in trouble with the law and may be facing hard time. He's been dealing in illegal credit cards and software. He badly doesn't want his eleven year old son to know about that, of course. He wants him to really believe he is a hero. However, some of the advice he gives his son is not too smart. He believes that when finding a lost wallet at a restaurant, you keep it and not turn it in to the restaurant manager cause restaurant managers are crooks. He also believes that the homeless begging on the street are all con artists that take advantage of anyone with a soft heart. That one has some truth to it with some of them, but not with all of them like Bernie says. And Bernie is not right about many homeless owning condominiums. I've known both kinds of homeless people in my life, the ones who were lowdown lying con men and ones who had a kinder purer heart than anyone with money. I think that Bernie means well with trying to teach his son the ropes, but some of his views have been formed by his own personal life experiences causing him to totally lose trust with the world.The big movie moment is of course the plane crashing before Bernie's car and him heroically breaking the door down, walking inside of the crashed plane which is seriously infected with smoke and carbon monoxide, and drags out about 5 different injured and immobile people including news reporter Gena Davis. Nobody on the plane got any kind of good look at the mysterious rescuer's face, if they had, the movie would've taken a whole different turn. And nobody that knows him (his ex wife, his boss who fires him due to being tired of his c***) believes for one second that he pulled this courageous heroic move. Only his homeless friend Andy Garcia who is about to make a move no friend would do to a friend. Andy tells everybody he was the hero. He receives a million dollars, and becomes well loved by the entire city of Chicago. Even if Andy did hog the credit due to financial desperation and being sick and tired of being homeless, he could've still shared some of the wealth with Bernie, even 10% of it would've been $100,000 and the imposter would've still had $900,000. Bernie initially refused to take the credit for his rescue act because he's in trouble with the law and he didn't want to be spotted, and that he was a believer of keeping a low profile (as he told his son that too). But once he realized the way such a rescuer would get showered with such love and money, he realized how maybe his heroic act could've outweighed the trouble he was in. But he waited until it was too late. If he had come forward sooner, he would have had the $25,000 he needed for the court that he promised them with the judge not believing for a second that he would ever be able to produce. He would've completely turned his life around and everyone that knew him would've completely revaluated what they thought of him. But he waited until it was too late.Bernie spends a good part of the movie belatingly trying to convince everyone that he was the real hero, and remains very unsuccessful at convincing anybody, except his son who partially suspects maybe his dad really was the one since he came over to his exs wearing one shoe, and the hero was missing a shoe. But his mom, Joan quickly tells him that there was no way that his dad would ever have done any such thing, whether he was missing a shoe or not. As Bernie continues his increasing frustrations at nobody believing him, his legal problems continue to complicate his life further. Meanwhile, former homeless man Andy gets used to the good life and his newfound wealth, and has reporter Davis getting rather romantically interested in him due to his new hero status and for "saving her life". Chevy Chase plays Davis's boss at the news station. I could see how Chevy's glory days were ending. He wasn't quite the same anymore in this movie as he was during his kickin 1980s years in National Lampoon's vacation, European vacation, Christmas vacation, Fletch, and Funny farm. In Vegas vacation too in 1996, he noticeably lost his touch. Another interesting scene in this movie was when Davis interviewed a man who then jumped to his death off a forty story building. I did like Davis's onion metaphor at a news conference. Overall, this was a pretty good movie.

Petty criminal Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) gets convicted. Before sentencing, his lawyer (Susie Cusack) gets his bail continued and advises him to reconnect with his son Joey to look good for probation. That's after he steals money from her purse. His ex-wife Evelyn (Joan Cusack) hates him. He tells his kid tall tales and teaches him to look out for one's self. His car breaks down and he encounters a crashed plane in a stormy night. In an unusual move, he risks his life to rescue everybody including hard-driving reporter Gale Gayley (Geena Davis). He drives off leaving behind a shoe. Gale and the news director (Chevy Chase) use the shoe to search for her hero. Only Bernie had given the other half of the pair to homeless John Bubber (Andy Garcia). John brings in the shoe and becomes an overnight media sensation with a million dollar reward.This is an old fashion screwball in many ways. People talk fast. Even the cynicism has an old fashion flavor. Chevy Chase is an old-timey news guy. Geena Davis is a fun broad. Mostly, it's all about Dustin Hoffman. He is able to play the cynical Bernie with grumpy joy. There are good laughs and it's got good heart. It's old fashion in a way that isn't cheesy.

I saw this movie and have watched it a few times. Something about the movie is rather good. I also find it very annoying in a sense as well. Runs the table between being good and not so good all at the same time. A guy who is a bit of a small time crook and con man is really having a tough go of it. He ends up at the scene of a plane crash and ends up helping a large number of the passengers off the plane before it explodes. He does not want to be recognized for this partly due to the fact that the little boy who asked him to help his daddy. The guy rescues all these people, but did not stumble across the kid's dad thus he thinks that the father did not survive. Basically this guy seems like a bad person, but in reality he does have a soft spot. Well another man ends up taking credit for this rescue, a man that got a hold of something that linked the guy who did the rescue to said event. He basically gave the real hero a drive and the guy gave him a shoe as he lost the other at the crash. The film has good stars as Dustin Hoffman plays the person who did the rescuing and Gena Davis is the one that launches the search for him when he does not immediately step forward. Andy Garcia plays the one who takes the credit. There are funny moments, but I did not care for parts of the ending mainly the ledge scene and how it got turned around on who was helping who. Still it was an okay comedy/drama, liked the part with the father and son and the zoo.

A great, inspirational, and underrated movie. Mariah Carey's song Hero was originally written for the movie by Carey to be sung by Gloria Estefan. Between Mariah being persuaded to keep the song for herself and the people working on the movie thinking the song didn't quite fit the film, Mariah Carey kept the song for herself... eventually making it one of her signature songs. The movie itself is a signature in my life, no matter how corny it may seem. It has so many beautiful moments between all the cornball scenes. This film is pretty heroic in its own way.The film touches on a variety of concepts that I've explored in my own life. The worst of people can do something great, the greatest of people can do something bad. It's knowledge like that that gives us hope to become a better person and it gives us warning to remain good. Life and reality and all those things try to place us in roles where we're meant to act a certain way and be a certain way because of who we are. But we are all individuals living in individual moments. Just as no two people are the same, no two moments are the same. Change is always available... We just have to figure out a way to use it for our good.Watch this movie!