Reviewed by Neil Davey
Stars Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Andy Garcia, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Emile Hirsch,
Kevin Bacon, Kelly Hu, Julie Delpy, Clark Gregg, Evan Parke | Written by Jieho Lee & Bob DeRosa
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 91 minutes | Directed by Jieho Lee
Life is a series of interconnected events. But hey, you've all seen Crash and Babel and Magnolia, so you already know that. As those films prove, this interwoven philosophical stuff is a bloody hard sub-genre to pull off. Crash was perhaps the most overrated film of the past 10 years; Magnolia was a good idea in search of an editor; and Babel, while immensely moving, well made and beautifully acted, was just too damn worthy for its own good. Yet along comes newcomer Jieho Lee and his cast of decent names to show us all how it's done. Or, as it happens, show that Crash and Magnolia in particular have a new rival for the title of "most pretentious film of the 21st Century".
It's based on a Chinese philosophy that the four cornerstones of life are happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love, and takes those four sensations as the themes for its various strands. Things also start positively with Happiness, which stars Whitaker as a dull pen-pusher who breaks out of his grey life to gamble — in big style — on an insider tip. When that goes wrong, he finds himself in debt to Fingers (Garcia), who got his name from his party trick of using sharp garden implements to remove the offending digits from the people who owe him money.
Ignoring for a moment the fact that Fingers is introduced as an opera-loving thug — because opera is clearly the entertainment medium of choice for all major movie psychopaths — Whitaker's talent carries this story to powerful effect. That mood is continued — to almost the same quality — as Pleasure charts Fingers' semi-clairvoyant henchman, played by Fraser, as he's called to babysit the boss's sex-mad nephew (Hirsch). It's at the halfway stage that it all starts to unravel. The signal for this? The arrival of Gellar for the appropriately titled Sorrow. It's not her fault — her troubled popstar falling in love with clairvoyant henchman tale is just abysmally written — but with this, two Scooby Doos and Southland Tales under her belt, she's starting to suggest that Buffy was a complete fluke.
The decline is completed with Love, which not even the presence of Bacon and Delpy can salvage. The storyline here? Bacon is the doctor who needs Gellar's rare blood type to save the love of his life from a snakebite. No. Honestly. Bacon, so often the best thing even in bad movies, is drowning in hysteria from the second he appears. It's possibly the only bad performance he's ever given, which is a plus, but that really just serves to prove how bad — and how far up its own arse — Lee's movie is. Of course, it could actually be smarter than it first appears, because if the moral of the story is meant to be that life sucks, the final 45 minutes certainly proves that point.
EXTRAS Nothing of any real interest — just a photo gallery and the trailer.