This movie tries really hard to blend retro film noir with Tarantino gore, but mostly it's an inexplicable mess, in the grand tradition of Queens Logic; Siesta; Bodies, Rest & Motion; and other pointless, forgettable movies made up of a well-known ensemble cast, most of whom haven't made a good movie in years. It's annoyingly, self-consciously pretentious; incredibly poorly and repetitively written; and outstandingly badly acted. Everyone seems to be imitating someone else. Burt Reynolds seems to be imitating Bo Diddley. Gabriel Byrne acts like a high school drama geek trying to be a '30s gangster. The normally lovely Ellen Barkin looks like a female impersonator, and a bad one at that. Kyle MacLachlan -- well, I think he went off his medication or something. And Jeff Goldblum tries to act cool in a Robert Mitchum/Humphrey Bogart kind of way, which made me wish theaters came equipped with barf bags. He's just so repulsive -- every time he appeared on the screen I avoided looking directly at him, so during closeups I found myself focusing on blurry background scenery.
The writer must have some sick fascination with the early '80s -- characters are named Falco (as in "Rock Me Amadeus") and Holiday (as in the Madonna song), and Billy Idol has a cameo, which was the most entertaining part of the film (entertaining only because I thought, is that Billy Idol? No, it can't be! Yes, it is!), although he barely got out his trademark sneer before getting killed.
WIthin the first 30 seconds, I knew I was going to hate this film, but I thought I should give it the old college try. After the opening credits, nothing made sense. I thought maybe the projectionist had started with the second reel by accident. Then I realized that it wasn't just that the things the characters were saying didn't make sense in context, there were entire sentences that made no sense in any sense, like maybe the script was originally written in Mandarin and then translated to French and then to English. Finally I said to myself, I know my life is empty and sad and pathetic, but I've got to have better things to do than watch this.
Final proof that this movie popped out of a hole in the space/time continuum: After I left the theater, I looked through the newspaper to try to find a review of it and figure out why I thought it might be something I wanted to see. THERE WAS NO MENTION OF IT IN THE PAPER!!! No review, not even an ad. Which makes me think that the marketing people couldn't find any good reviews of it to quote for an ad, which means that even that ABC-Radio guy who says every movie that comes out is "The Best Movie of the Year!" couldn't find anything good to say about Mad Dog Time.
Note:
it now goes by the name Trigger Happy on video.
Beware.
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