If you set out to purposefully miscast a film, you couldn’t do a better job than THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES did inadvertently. Tom Hanks is too inherently likeable to be the racist Wall Street guy callously throwing other people to the wolves; Bruce Willis is too self-serious to be the drunken journalist accidentally ruining lives; Kim Cattrall and Melanie Griffith are in entirely different movies. The tone is all over the place and doesn’t succeed in telling the story of racism and social stratification that it’s trying to tell. Like HEARTS OF DARKNESS and APOCALYPSE NOW, the making of the film (in the form of Julie Salamon’s book The Devil’s Candy) is more interesting than the film itself. Too inept to even be fun.