"Rain Man" is just a movie planned to be a box office hit drawing moviegoers and their money to see Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in a "heartwarming" film. The closest feeling to heartwarming would have been the heartburn caused by greasy popcorn in the theater. I taped the movie from the TV and, after watching it, realized I now had three hours of VCR tape that I could record over. True, the movie had been edited for television, but they couldn't have cut all the good parts and left two and a quarter hours that should have been swept up with the rest of the dirt from the cutting-room floor.

I refuse to bore readers by recounting what the writers attempted to pass off to the public as a plot, but for those of you who were suckered by overly optimistic advertising into wasting your hard-earned money to laugh not at the "amusing" parts of the movie but at the lack of a real storyline while you could have been doing more important things like flossing, I'll explain why I feel this way.

The sequence of events was hard to follow. The end, when Raymond decides to return to the institution was played up emotionally by the deft use of lighting, over-extended silences, and background music, and the movie poorly handled the topic of autism , any intelligent person will know what autism is before seeing the movie, and if an individual did not know, the movie wouldn't have explained the problem clearly. The plot was not cohesive, and the only character that was really likable was Raymond (OK, Cruise's girlfriend was acceptable). Dustin Hoffman's acting was a valiant but useless attempt to save this horrendous attempt at a feature film, and Tom Cruise was so self-conscious that even though his character's name was repeated a zillion times, I can't recall what it was , visions of "Top Gun" kept cropping up in my mind. I have no idea what would posses people to repeat their original mistake and see this movie two or (can you believe it?) even three times, unless it's just for the view of Cruise's body topless; if I were a big Cruise fan I'd consider this movie a flop and an embarrassment in his career.

Therefore, as a critic wise beyond my years, I strongly suggest that anyone lucky enough to have missed this movie should give thanks. n