Raising Arizona (1987)

Variety
"...Quirky humor and off-the-wall situations....As a director Coen demonstrates an assured technical touch..." 03/04/1987

Los Angeles Times
"...RAISING ARIZONA is miraculously adept technically....Nicolas Cage has crammed every ounce of sweet earnestness into Hi..." 03/20/1987 p.C1

USA Today
"...Still one of its year's best movies..." 04/30/1996 p.8D

VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever 0 of 10
Hi's an ex-con and the world's worst hold-up man. Ed's a policewoman. They meet, fall in love, marry, and kidnap a baby (one of a family of quints). Why not? Ed's infertile and the family they took the baby from has "more than enough," so who will notice? But unfinished furniture tycoon Nathan Arizona wants his baby back, even if he has to hire an axe-murderer on a motorcycle to do it. A brilliant, original comedy narrated in notorious loopy deadpan style by Cage. Innovative camerawork by Barry Sonnefield. Wild, surreal and hilarious.
 
Apollo Movie Guide 8 of 10
Everyone and everything is larger than life in Raising Arizona...It's an amazing world...For H.I. (Nicolas Cage), life is pretty simple. He robs convenience stores; he goes to jail; he talks nice to a parole board; the cycle repeats itself. But this pattern is broken -- sort of -- when he meets the cop who takes his mug shots. With Ed (Holly Hunter), it's love at first sight, and after a few more cycles in and out of jail, H.I. gives Ed a ring and they're off to wedded bliss...The happy time is short-lived, as the quirky couple soon start pining for a little one...Raising Arizona is a remarkable spectacle of overblown characters, sights, sounds and events. Director Joel Coen, and his co-screenwriting brother Ethan, have created a fantastic and hilarious world that's close to the one we live in, but with the brightness turned way, way up. There's little room for subtlety here, and the audience doesn't mind in the least. Memorable scenes include the 'birth' of two screaming convicts (one played by John Goodman) who gain freedom from their underground tunnel by pushing their way out and into freedom through the mud created by a downpour...Both Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter were early in their careers when they made Raising Arizona, and each of them makes a great impact. Cage gives the good-hearted but consistently dazed H.I. an odd credibility. Wacky though he and everything around him may be, he actually seems real and exceedingly likeable. Hunter is even better as the diminutive police officer who falls for the crook. She's at once terse and cop-like uptight, and perpetually ready to spill over with emotion on a moment's notice. She too is delightfully likable...Raising Arizona is a cartoon-like movie that defines the word 'quirky' and is equally good whether you watch it purely for laughs or for its messages about the decency that's in almost everyone, no matter what their line of work or appearances. - Brian Webster
 
Chicago Sun-Times 5 of 10
I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters. They usually end up sounding silly. For every movie like "True Grit" that works with lines like "I was determined not to give them anything to chaff me about," there is a "Black Shield of Falworth," with lines like "Yonder lies the castle of my father." Generally speaking, it's best to have your characters speak in strong but unaffected English, especially when your story is set in the present. Otherwise they'll end up distracting the hell out of everybody...That's one of the problems with "Raising Arizona." The movie is narrated by its hero, a man who specializes in robbing convenience stores, but it sounds as if he just graduated from the Rooster Cogburn school of elocution. There are so many "far be it from me's" and "inasmuches" in his language that he could play Ebenezer Scrooge with the same vocabulary - and that's not what you expect from a two-bit thief who lives in an Arizona trailer park...The movie cannot decide if it exists in the real world of trailer parks and 7-Elevens and Pampers, or in a fantasy world of characters from another dimension. It cannot decide if it is about real people, or comic exaggerations. It moves so uneasily from one level of reality to another that finally we're just baffled. Comedy often depends on frustrating the audience's expectations. But how can it work when we don't have a clue about what to expect - when the movie itself doesn't know what is possible and what is not? "Raising Arizona" is the new work by the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, whose previous film was the superb thriller "Blood Simple." That was a movie that pushed reality as far as it could go within the rigid confines of a well-made thriller. "Raising Arizona" needs the same kind of restraint. It's all over the map. If the same story had been told straight, as a comic slice of life, it might have really worked. - Roger Ebert