Reviews

This is cornball tripe at it's worse. There are enough contrived situations, types and sentiments bundled into this movie to cover a whole season of sitcoms. Tamra's movie is a mess. Drew Barrymore is a mess, as usual, also. The lead male cast should be embarrassed for participating, especially Dean Cain, who is probably the most used to this kind of crappy writing, since he's basically a TV star. This is one of those bad movies that perhaps you'll want to finish watching simply to see if it can get any worse. It does. The most pleasure attained here is watching most of the leads suffer as the laughable finale hits you right in the groin. I'm chuckling just thinking about it! Oh yeah, I sat through the end credits; and Mr. Cain dedicated his performance to his Air Force dad or something like that. Oh bah-ruh-ther!

I knew I was going to dig this picture in the first ten minutes, when a colossal bald muscleman is brought forward to conquer our hero, Brad-Achilles-Pit, who is currently busy screwing two beautiful slave babes, but rallies forth when summoned, and dispatches the giant in a single blow. This pretty much sets the stage for this brutal, beefy handling of the old story of Helen of Sparta, the siege of Troy and the Trojan horse. As usual, lots of liberties are taken with the Homerian legend, a moot point, really, if they come up with something as well structured and stirring as this epic finally is. The scale is grand, the pacing is tight and the cast is uniformly good. It's all about conquest and brutality, with a slight dose of romance (nothing too intruding, although a bit more female pulchritude on display would have balanced it a bit and added some genre flourishes. Hah!). The big fight between Achilles and Hector is well worth the build-up. This is an ancient adventure in the best tradition, and totally enjoyable. The bigger the screen and louder the volume, the better. My only quibble: I wish the music score would have been better realized. The dirge-like female moaning didn't work well in GLADIATOR and is just a distracting pastiche here. This would have been scored to perfection by Elmer Bernstein or Jerry Goldsmith; oh well, at least James Horner didn't use his obligatory child chorus, and, thank God, Celine Dion wasn't recruited for the end title song (yuck).

This picture generally works for what it is, a rather silly dirty joke pleasantly pulled off by the well-played leads on an eccentric cast of Felliniesque gays. The assortment of grotesques give it enough sparkle to keep it amusing for 82 minutes, and a couple of the bits are first-rate crude. This seedy British comedy certainly wins out over the stupid frat-boy comedies that glut the American movie market trying to give out the same dose of offensive humor. It amazes me that some reviewers used the stupid term "politically incorrect" when making their analysis of such a harmless, rather cartoonish sex comedy like this one. The Iron Lady bits were the best and the colorist did a notably terrific job with the saturated look of the picture.

It's amazing how much this film resembles one of those low-budget actioners about a Westerner going to the Orient and becoming a big hero. We're talking "Action Cinemax" here, except that you have a multi-million dollar budget and Tom Cruise in the lead. The picture is visually lush, although the CGI is very evident (unlike in, say, a movie like MASTER AND COMMANDER, where it's all but invisible). As for Cruise, he's unconvincing as an alcoholic, world-weary American soldier, a role more suited to someone like Nick Nolte than a boyish, fresh face like Tom. Everything is just as you expect it here, so there are no surprises of any kind, except that we don't, and quite surprisingly I might add, get a sex scene for Tom and his Japanese sex interest. A drag, if you ask me. It's not unenjoyable because there are big battles that are terrific to watch, and the cliches are played with charm by the Japanese cast, but it's humorless and unoriginal whenever the "Westerners" take to the forefront. Far less than the David Lean or Kurosawa epics it tries too hard to pay tribute to.

These kinds of movies are generally a waste of time, unless you're a daytime TV fan or worse. This one is really a working-class weepy, with a trashy leading lady living in a trailer with her wonderfully romantic pool-boy husband, a couple of brats and mother next door. The dying lead is enlightened enough to wrap up all her loose life ends in the best tradition of fantasy, female protagonists; and, even though she seems rather dumb and lifeless up to this point in her life, leaps to surprisingly wonderful depths when told she's about to kick the bucket. There are many little vignettes to vomit over. My favorite was creating annual tapes for her surviving children (up to their 18th birthdays, if they can survive that). The other was getting pool-boy spouse set up with the neighbor girl so he'd have a needed sexlife along with the kiddie baggage. This is really demented stuff, without even mentioning her quick affair with another loser who woos her to the tune of "Senza Fine (Without end)" on his car stereo. An incredible joke or a tribute to the never-ending survival of dopey cinema. You'll cry with laughter.

This one is a hyper little thriller that uses human guinea pigs to outline the hidden evils in everyday working class folks. It's all done in good fun and escalates into nasty, heavy-handed melodramatics in the finale. It's all thoroughly enjoyable because it's done in high style and with a terrific cast. It's visually exciting from start to end, and the psychology is strictly a gimmick to heighten the thrills and broadly-staged emotions. The sexual and political innuendos are gratuitous but stimulating, so my advice is to sit back and flow with the concept here. A claustrophobic thriller about how mean people can be to each other with little or no fundamental reasoning behind it.