Purple Rain

The film is like East of Eden replayed as a hyperbolic rock fever dream. There are a few sour, juvenile moments, but this is the rare pop movie that works the way a great rock & roll song does: It tells a simple, almost elemental tale and uses the music to set it aflame.

Playing a character rooted in his own background, and surrounded by the real-life members of his Minneapolis-based musical 'family,' rock star Prince makes an impressive feature film debut in Purple Rain, a rousing contemporary addition to the classic backstage musical genre.

Magnoli’s professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film’s climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince’s vanity project entirely justifiable.

If you like Prince's music, you'll love this movie. If not, stay away.

The pop-music star Prince makes his movie debut in this bizarre drama about a rock singer with a troubled career and a miserable home life.

A fairly dappy and overlong attempt to turn Prince the then emergent rock-funk superstar into a movie star.

Purple Rain is not a revolution. It's not even a good movie. What it is, is a cosmic letdown. [27 Jul 1984]

What a pleasant surprise, Purple Rain is not only fills with a surprisingly great performance by all the cast especially Prince, the music is fun, groovy, and rock and roll, if you never listen to Prince song before, just watch it, it's better when you heard it for the first time, overall Purple Rain is surprisingly a fantastic film.

10 for the music and the performance scenes......anytime Prince is on stage and playing, it is going to be great. The acting on the other hand???? That's gets a 1. I have no idea how some of the acting made it past the editing room. They obviously didn't have the budget to hire trained actors in a lot of cases. LOL!

A higher score than a mere a 5/10 I cannot give despite having enjoyed the movie; The movie displays every attribute you'd expect from a b-movie. Prince tries to keep his gig in some establishment. He soon has to compete with Appolonia's group ("Sex Shooter") which has been recruited by Morris Day - who looks like a stereotypical negro clown pimp. Two more subplots include Appolonia being a potential love-interest of Prince, though this looked more like the main theme. The second sub-plot was Wendy & Lisa's role; The guitarist and the keyboard operator feel underappreciated. Prince never listens to their input by ignoring their tapes for example. Since the get-go of this subplot, at 1/3rd of the movie, it's clear W&L wrote the "Purple Rain" gig. Will Prince learn his lesson and play their song? And why would Prince learn his lesson? Stay till the end of the movie to find out. Maybe a third sub-plot was the theme of Appolonia's naked body - a beautiful body, beautiful breasts. Completely unnecessary and the nudity scenes felt out of place, but (((Hollywood))) eyh. It was interesting to see Prince putting all of his emotion in a certain song. Never seen it before. It was a mix of laughable and endearing. Maybe this is really him, which in that case I'd retract the "laughable" part. The Revolution didn't play really a role. From the glimpses of Prince's crew I'd say most of them are gay or something. Everybody had a tiny little role to play, but said Prince's crew. Do they lack that much charisma and talent? I wouldn't know. Perhaps Wendy and Lisa were the only ones with talent at that time. One has to observe the little things as they don't get much acting time. Also notice how the under-appreciation theme of the movie turned out to be a real issue. That's why W&L left Prince and began their own group. Acting-wise Appolonia's was the worst. The nude scenes described why she was hired. For die-hard Prince fans only.

A musical that plays too much of a musical instead of a movie. With Purple Rain, it should've been a musical in a musical theatre that are playing musicals where there's one that's actually close to you.

Purple Rain the movie is really bad. There is no sense in sitting through such garbage to listen to the music by Prince. The movie was difficult to sit through. I gave it about 50 minutes before I shut her down. The scenes were horrible. The acting was crud. The story line was terrible. They could have really did a good job with the movie, but boy did they fall off the cliff.