Rise and fall of the New York club, Studio 54

Rating: Null/10 (14 July 1999)

54 ( rating, * out of 5 )
From Miramax comes a picture written and directed by Mark Christopher about a horde of obnoxious and disagreeable people that during the late 70's and early 80's, frequented the coolest nightspot on the planet, (or so they want us to believe) the one and only, Studio 54.
This alleged hot-spot was the focal point for a tribe of wannabes that any average punter couldn't give a rat's rear-end about - vile excuses for humanity that are as vulgar as they are irrelevant.
Shane (Ryan Phillippe) turns his back on his tedious New Jersey existence for the glamour of being a bus-boy at Studio 54. Evidently, New Jersey is a low-brow sort of place where Cro-Magnon men take their cave-girl dates out for beef jerky and slurpees.
After several sub-plots that painfully go nowhere, Shane ends up as a bartender - a job that keeps his pocket piccolo happy and many crotch crickets in his pants. Everyone with ambition and no acting ability wants to be a Studio 54 barman because this is where the women and drugs flow as freely as Mark Christopher's idiotic dialogue and contrived situations.
Shane, (who bears a striking similarity to Christopher Atkins) meets Anita, (Salma Hayek) who wants to be Patti Labelle but without the talent - the kind of aspiring star-to-be that appears fascinated by popping champagne corks, rockets blasting off, cucumbers and trains rushing through tunnels.
Anita is married to this half-pint wingnut who doesn't really have any relevance to the overall story but successfully provides a series of unplanned annoyances. Then there's the club owner, Steve Rubell (Mike Myers) who is having trouble with a collection of bad suits from the Internal Revenue Service. (we don't really care about him either)
Shane falls for Julie Black, (Neve Campbell) a soap actress who is also trying to further her career by bedding stupefied film-producers. The end mercifully comes when Shane and Julie realize how shallow and pretentious their contemporaries really are...like der.
I never thought there would ever be anything as idiotic as disco, but I never figured on a movie about disco. Studio 54 comes across as nothing more than a New York bag shanty where the mezzanine floor is reserved for a bit of blanket drill while the showbiz elite have a place to demonstrate their comatose wit.
This movie has all the steamy sex of 'Better Homes and Gardens' and by the time Neve Campbell is required to deliver lines, I was ready to cough up a phlegm ball.
Ryan Phillippe displays no redeeming qualities required for a leading man and Mike Myers is completely squandered as the strange and enigmatic Rubell. However, he does have a moment or two and is the only reason this movie rates its one star. The collective cast come across as anti-social butterflies who bump and grind to that oxymoron of modern times, disco music.
This movie really started to reek after about five minutes and after ten minutes of this pretentious guff, I had to resist the urge to run screaming into the hills. Basically, this flick is a cheap retread of 'Saturday Night Fever', without the dance routines and with a lot more boring bits. Studio 54 manages to achieve one thing in spectacular fashion though, and that is to remind us all how uncool we really were.