Here's my advice: if you're going to pare down a crime movie to its essentials -- character and dialogue -- you better make damn sure you've got a good script. And the script (written by Fabian's son, Christian Forte) is a piece of crap. Some warmed-over clichés here, a little heavy-handed symbolism there (posters of Humphrey Bogart and the old film G-Men adorn the bar -- okay, we get it), piddling inconsistencies that add up, and some whoppingly unbelievable "twists" -- it all equals crap. The main characters, three small-time crooks holed up in a bar (called the Last Chance Bar -- get it, huh, get it?) as they are besieged by police who've mistaken them for international criminals, could have been pulled off the shelves of any Tired Old Stereotypes library: the Young Hothead (Matt Dillon), the Reasonable One (Gary Sinise), the Crazed Psycho (William Fichtner).
The actors don't help -- most of them seem to be phoning in their performances. You may have heard about the food that was spiked with PCP on the shoot of Titanic -- well, I think the catering on the Albino Alligator shoot was spiked with Valium. The lugubrious pacing of the film only adds to its overall sleep-inducing atmosphere.
Buried somewhere beneath all the sorry-ass clichés are the shreds of a good story; it's understandable why a "25-words-or-less" pitch would make it sound attractive. Maybe a better director could have done something, but Spacey uses bad haircuts, jumpy editing, and long pans of things like the yellow median line on a street to try to establish some sort of gritty crime feeling, and it just doesn't work. Stick to acting, Kevin -- and some more of those great impressions.
But let's end this on a good note: on my way home, I passed the theater showing Hamlet (line around the block, by the way). One side of the marquee read: "Alas Poor Mork" (Robin Williams is in it, in case you don't know). The other side said: "In Denmark, no one can hear you scream."
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