Film Review - Dying Young (1991)

Dying Young stars Julia Roberts as Hilary O'Neill, a young woman who moves out of her apartment when she sees her boyfriend cheating on her, now looking for work she answers an ad for a nurse placed there by a young man named Victor (Campbell Scott) who is also dying of a terminal disease.

Dying Young wants to be a heartfelt love story about love conquering all and how two unexpected people can come together and feel love despite one of them dying of a disease but the film just doesn't have anything at all to really let itself soar like a great love story does.

For one, there's very little heart to the film Scott just plays the character for the most part like a complete jerk and either hides things from Hilary or just orders her about like one of his servants one of whom also gets the cold shoulder, unbelievable.

The next problem is that there is very little chemistry between Roberts and Scott and that alone can be enough to kill a romantic story there and then, I mean you do get the sense that these two would be friends, good friends even but I just didn't buy them as lovers, especially in the film's final act.

But the biggest problem of all in this film is that from the moment the two meet for the first time, you can almost immediately predict how the rest of the film will play out and for the most part you just sit there waiting for it to get to that point so you can either walk out of the cinema, watch the end previews on your video copy before rewinding the cassette so it can be returned to your video library or taking the DVD out of the machine to well take back to the shop.

There was one thing I liked about the film surprisingly and that was Vincent D'Onofrio as Gordon, a local handyman who catches Robert's eye and he's actually really good in the film, its the one time where I felt the film had a real heart and sincerity to it and you felt the absence of it when he wasn't on screen.

So all in all, Dying Young is the kind of film that you would most likely rent for your aunt or nana to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon when there's nothing on TV, they might enjoy it more than I did but I didn't think this romance was very romantic, more like a cold love affair in a white hospital room with the couple growing more distant and one of them slowly dying, 1 and a half out of 5.