From the Chicago Reader (December 18, 2000). — J.R.
I don’t get it. Maybe my bias against drug dealers, drug barons, and drug addicts as interesting characters is responsible, but I don’t see this slightly better-than-average drug thriller, with slightly better-than-average direction by Steven Soderbergh, as anything more than a routine rubber-stamping of genre reflexes. (Even the film’s racism — the implication that drug taking by teenage white girls logically leads to their having sex with black males — seems depressingly typical.) Nothing especially new or fresh has been added to the formula by Stephen Gaghan’s screenplay, which shuttles between southern California, Mexico, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., but if you’re happy just to see Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Douglas, Luis Guzman, Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Albert Finney, among others, move across the screen and deliver lines, here’s your chance to indulge. 147 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (December 18, 2000). — J.R.
When Robert Zemeckis starts getting serious, it’s time to clear the streets. According to David Denby, Cast Away demonstrates that the director is now ready to tackle Melville, but I’m not sure he’s even ready for Defoe: this is at best an OK variation on the Robinson Crusoe saga sandwiched between sections of an unsatisfying love story. It’s several cuts down from Luis Buñuel’s 1952 Defoe adaptation and seriously hampered by the absence of any Friday (unless one counts a blood-smeared volleyball treated like a fetish and surrogate human), but it’s certainly enhanced by Tom Hanks. Less unctuous than he was as Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, Hanks plays a FedEx employee who finds himself on a desert island with all the time in the world. The film holds one’s interest, and there’s some nice if underdeveloped ironic poetry when the hero has to depend on diverse FedEx packages to keep himself alive. But this is too full of its own heavy breathing to work as the primordial storytelling it’s aiming for — a so-so adventure story is closer to the mark. Written by William Broyles Jr.; with Helen Hunt and Nick Searcy. 142 min. Read more
A Manhattan investment broker and playboy (Nicolas Cage) wakes up one morning to find himself living in New Jersey as a tire salesman, married to a woman he broke up with years before, and with kids. At first I thought I was watching yet another version of A Christmas Carol; then I wondered if it was a remake of It’s a Wonderful Life; finally I gave up trying to find anything at all in it that was unfamiliar. Brett Ratner directed this 2000 comedy from a script by David Diamond and David Weissman; with Don Cheadle, Tea Leoni, and Jeremy Piven. 126 min. (JR) Read more
