Four people hold up a bank, but the cops have been tipped off and arrive in seconds. A shoot out ensues and the surviving robbers are forced into a local café, where they take hostages. Two of their hostages turn out to be armed gang bangers, who turn the tables on the bank robbers, making them hostages as well. It was a pretty good opening, but from there it descends into your typical, slow moving, hostage drama, with paranoid cops, scared hostages, and unreasonable demands. Edward Furlong stars in this HBO thriller, and continues to be one of my favorite actors. He is so unappreciated and disrespected in Hollywood, because he was a child actor and will forever be known as that cute kid in Terminator 2. His Co-star is Michael Madsen is by far the worst actor I have ever seen. The guy thinks he's John Wayne, but the second he tries to show any emotion, people start laughing, because he is really that unbelievable. Madsen brings down the credibility of everything he is in, which makes me wonder how this guy continues to get work. Living & Dying has a great opening and an interesting ending, but unfortunately the middle is just about as boring and predictable as a movie can get.

Modern day Bonnie and Clyde try to make a run for it with the loot but get into a gun battle with the police, who were either poor shots or were using blanks. Whoops, Bonnie took a round in the gut! The robbers retreat to a café, and now Bonnie was near death. Luckily, a person (now a hostage) in the café had trained as a nurse, and performed emergency surgery then and there on the floor. Bonnie of course passed out from shock, blood loss, whatever - and the young nursing school dropout proclaimed: "She's gonna be alright! She's just passed out". Bonnie makes a miraculous recovery in a matter of minutes which is good because she is going to have to battle two psychopaths who were also hostages in the café, but now want all the stolen money, and to kill and or rape all the other hostages. WHAT A STUPID STORY. Michael Madsen made a mistake by being in the film. It was decided that Madsen's character would send a female TV reporter into the café because the murderous psychopaths inside demanded it. Hey wait a second, she'll get shot! "She's too pretty to shoot" was Madsen's line that made me laugh out loud. The reporter was raped then killed...I gave this film 2 stars because there is the possibility that there is a worse film out there somewhere. This film will make you laugh out loud, slap your forehead, and say things like "jeeze", "oh man", "WHAT??", etc., etc. If it were meant to be a comedy, I'd give this film 4 stars.

This film has an apt title. It starts out with some life and then chokes to death on its own indolent vomit. Writer/director Jon Keeyes sets up an interesting and multi-layered conflict and then, like he blew a brain fuse or something, he fritters away every last ounce of potential as the movie gets dumber and dumber and dumber until it ends in a twist so cretinous I almost suspect Keeyes let his pet hamster write the last 3 pages of the script.The story opens with a quartet of gun-wielding robbers storming into the offices of Duca Enterprises and taking all the money in the office's walk in safe. The cops show up before the robbers can escape and one of them is shot to death while the other three seek refuge in a café across the street. Once inside, though, the three remaining robbers and everyone else are taken hostage by two thugs who are much more violent and much stupider than our initial gang of thieves. The thugs couldn't resist the sight of two duffel bags full of money coming into the café just as they were having lunch. Meanwhile, the local cops on the outside of the café have to deal with the interference of the owner of Duca Enterprises, who comes off like a cross between Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazard and the guy with the wings in his hair from the Sopranos, along with an ATF agent who thinks he's living his own personal Quentin Tarantino movie.Now, it might not blow you away, but that's a cute little set up for a crime flick. There are several different dramatic dynamics established that could each go in different directions. For the first 15 to 20 minutes of Living and Dying, I really wanted to see how the story would end up. Unfortunately, where it went was down the rathole of poor plotting, terrible characterization, some remarkably inconsistent acting from Edward Furlong, a couple of inappropriate European accents and a rape scene that seems to be in the movie solely to satisfy the particular predilection of Jon Keeyes.This thing flails about with no idea of what it's doing or who the film is focused on. There's a subplot that's so crudely developed it's practically pre-embryonic, yet still manages to blatantly contradict itself. Michael Madsen looks like he's lost at sea, doing that same Michael Madsen shtick he always does but in an almost plaintive manner, as though he's trying to signal someone to rescue him from this mess. Furlong's performance switches about halfway through from trying reasonably hard to not giving a crap about anything. The hero cop of the film, played by Arnold Vosloo, is entirely emasculated and then offered up again to the audience as though they should take him seriously.Oddly, the best thing about Living and Dying is the acting of Ling Bai. She's best known as a tabloid chick who sort of sustains herself on a level somewhere below Tila Tequila in the pseudo-celebrity ecosystem. Though she's not asked to do a lot here, she's convincing both as a mother driven to crime to get back her daughter and as someone shot in the gut. That is, she's convincing as a gunshot victim until the movie becomes so moronic that it treats her injury like a hangnail.After a promising beginning, this film turns into garbage…and it's a more annoying sort of garbage for having started off decently. Unless you need to buck up your self-image by watching a movie made by someone obviously more feeble-witted than you are…give this one a pass.

I saw this DVD in my friends house and thought that this was a Turkish action movie with some Hollywood-not very big-names in it. Interested enough I decide to give it a shot later.. It was a tough to bear experience believe me. Then, after finally seeing the credits roll I tought 'We Turks really suck at Hollywood style film making.. This is an insult to the heist|hostage movie genre..' but then wait! I checked some names and no, they were not Turkish names and no, this was not a Turkish movie; on the contrary it was literally shot in America with an American director & crew! That made me thinking-again!- How on earth can you persuade names like Micheal Madsen, Edward Furlong or even Arnold Vosloo to take part in such a project? with money probably.. That kept me thinking further.. How can you raise such amount of money to offer them and a supposedly international cast? Then all my meditation paid off and I came to find the answer.By hiring the cheapest equipment and crew that you can find. And if you still have to difficulty in adjustin your budget then: by writing and directing the movie you are trying to produce-or vice versa I don't have any information on that-. So bottom line this is not a bad movie as everybody are so anxious to present as.. It makes you think -in my case even meditate- and there are a lot of movies outthere that doesn't give even that affect.. This one at least makes you think; It makes you wonder.. It leaves you with disbelief.. and then It makes you wonder again..