Brass Monkey

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2002)

Spoilers herein.
Terry Gilliam disappoints. He makes a competent film. He often folds narrative through time as he does here. He uses architecture as a central element in his shots. He is bold with camera perspectives. He creates alternative and strange worlds. He often deals with class actors who do their best work for him. He tweaks the scifi genre in sort places. All of that is true here. All of that is stuff I like.
But this film has no coherence. It is not enough to have a clever space and a clever camera angle if the aren't coordinated to create some effect. It is not enough to have Brad wonderfully careening if your eye isn't in the right space. There's just so much good stuff here all jumbled about. Little is controlled or exploited.
I contrast this with `Fear and Loathing' which had several advantages:
--Gilliam knew he screwed up on this one and was smart enough to know what to fix
--He was able to write his own script. This one has two many literary devices to comfortably be shoehorned into a novel cinematic framework.
--He had Depp, who understands how to act in a way that defines the space the eye only imagines. Depp's character was hallucinating and the hallucinations mapped well to Gilliam's sense of an alternative universe.
Not here. Willis and Pitt work really well together, each at the end of explored personal territory, but it isn't the same territory Gilliam shows us. Hitchcock -- who is relied on here -- affirms reality instead of redefining it.
Usually I can find some clever self-referential irony in this: a story about dissonant perception told in a manner that is perceptually dissonant. But it seems too competent a notion to put on this project. Things are different with `Loathing.' Better.
One think: I kept looking for someone to say "minkee" after Peter Sellers' famous, Python-inspiring bit in "Return of the Pink Panther."