Meet Joe Black

Meet Joe Black tells the story of death, the actual life ending death, falling in love with a mortal woman. Death (played by Brad Pitt) pretends to be an average Joe, more precisely Joe Black. Death wants to explore the human world before taking the life of a millionaire named Bill Parrish (played by Anthony Hopkins). However everything starts to get complicated when Black falls in love with the millionaires daughter, Susan (Claire Forlani).
The story was fluent and I wasn’t left confused at any point of the movie. It had a clear plot and it knew how to follow it without neither being boring nor having too much stuff going on all the time. Character development was made really well too, you could see Black slowly starting to understand things about the human world and old Parrish coming to terms with his death.
This of course is just my personal opinion but I absolutely love the casting of this movie. I had my doubts when I noticed Pitt playing death, as it might be a tricky character to get into, however he pulled it off wonderfully making death seem just like an innocent and curious human like creature. His co-star, Forlani, I had never seen before, that might make me uncultured or just plain ignorant, but I’ll have to accept my faith. Forlani however did her job really well and I’ll be definitely watching more movies from her. Hopkins was just as great as he always is, really great. Just seeing his name appear on the screen got my hopes up and I didn’t get disappointed. The side roles were cast well too, I can’t remember even once having to think ”They aren’t quite fit for the role”.
I consider every movie that lasts over three hours a long movie, this was one of them. However they might have had to cut important parts out in the attempt to make it shorter, and I appreciate how they didn’t do that. I don’t know much about directing a movie, so I don’t really know what to say about that. Again, that might make me even more uncultured and ignorant, but I cannot judge something I don’t know anything about. The same goes for many aspects of the movie.
Even though I might not be able to provide a perfectly insightful review on the directing, dressing, producing or things like that, I can recommend it to anyone who likes romantic movies. However if you want to see death as a hardcore emotionless killer, this is not the movie for you.