There's a book called "The Devil's Candy" about everything that went wrong with this movie. That book has gone through three editions. I think that says a lot. It's not just that this is a bad movie, but that so many talented people managed to make a bad movie, and in an interesting way. Tom Wolfe (who wrote the original novel) only had a couple tricks, but they were good ones: his "gonzo journalist" writing style and his satirical eye. The style would be very difficult to translate so De Palma didn't even try. Losing Wolf's satirical take is what unmoored this completely from the source material. So you're just left with a story about some rich people and a reporter and some activists and a judge and a DA... and, starting from scratch, can you make this more entertaining than your average TV movie?

But it's got Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman and a bunch of others, and the cinematography's impressive here and there. So: free on youtube, it's totally worth watching.