but, if you've got the stomach and a curiosity about the non-Disney side of the human personality, this dark, insightful, and yes, violent, tale is for you.  What always gets me about this movie is DeNiro's performance.  DAMN!!!  He IS Travis Bickle.  That's how amazing his acting (in this) is-yet we know he isn't.  This is the 'Master of Puppets' (Metallica' best, and most powerful, album) for DeNiro.  The power of his performance here is beyond description.  How he got from 'Taxi Driver' to where he is today would make for another 'dark journey' movie...  By the way, for those reviewers who don't understand why he doesn't go to jail at the end, think about the kind of people he killed-the kind the police would just as soon kill themselves if they could get away with it.  He was doing the police a favor, in a weird sort of way.  Plus this is inner city NYC-nobody cares about these types of people anyway in 'this part of town'-you're on your own.  The making Travis out to be a hero was on purpose-to show how society has a twisted sense of rewarding the 'wrong people'-GET IT???  As for the color of the blood at the end, you should have watched the 'making of' part of the DVD-They talk about how the negatives for the original had deteriorated so much that they were not able to be saved.  If you just plain didn't like it, well, you can see you're in the minority.  Even if it's too violent for you, I don't see how you could ignore DeNiro's performance-it's why acting was invented, or Scorsese's (and crew) amazingly thick vibe that so perfectly complements DeNiro's tour de force performance.  As for Leonard Maltin and his opinion...well you know what opinions are like...