I think I tried to watch it many years ago and couldn't get into it. I can see why – it's a very peculiar film, and there's a lot of WTF moments in it.
I managed to see it all this time, but it did take me two sittings. Started it yesterday, but got tired midway through so I finished it off today.
It's not necessarily a bad film at all. But it is rather confusing and chaotic. A lot of the time the editing and the voice overs (coupled with bad sound recording) make the film feel lurchy and distorted. The drunken scene with Harvey Keitel when he has the camera strapped to him great, and I think works really well, but other parts of the film are equally disorienting due to shaky camera work and choppy composition, when perhaps that wasn't the desired effect.
There's lots of bad cutting between scenes that often makes you scratch your head, or jump back a bit in surprise. I spent a bit of time wondering wait, where are we? What's going on? And I don't feel like it was in a positive way.
Some of the storylines seemed like non sequiturs, and I wasn't sure what they meant. For example, just off the top of my head, the scene where the drunken soldier back from Vietnam jumps up and tries to attack the girl, why did he do that? And why did Harvey Keitel end up dancing with her in a cupboard? What was the deal with the dancer who he invited out for Chinese food, but then didn't show? And why did we cut to a scene with her at the end after the car crash? Why? What? When? How?
The final scene was pretty good (and very unexpected). Robert DeNiro was great in it, and I found the character he played pretty different from anything else I've ever seen him do. The music was also fantastic.
I wasn't sure about all the religious themes running through the film. At times it felt a little overdone.
But the thing about the film is, in this weird way, from the moments of brilliance here and there, you can see that Scorsese was destined for bigger things. 7/10
