Reasonable story with strong sense of period covering the weak characters

Rating: Null/10 (28 March 2004)

In the 1970's Shane and his friends go out in New York to see if they can get into the exclusive club 54. Shane gets in but his friends don't, and he immediately falls for the glamorous life. He gets a job in the club and gradually works his way up from busboy to barman, getting more money, drugs and sex than he can handle. However as relationships crumble and the excesses become the norm, things are bound to break eventually.

With the success of Boogie Nights, period films from the Seventies were suddenly good business if you could pull them off. 54 is set in the `legendary' nightclub of the same name - although I must confess that the news of this `legendary' place never reached me in rural Northern Ireland, although I was aware of the place before I saw this film. The lack of introduction to the place put me off a little bit - it expected the audience to already be in awe of this great club without it doing anything to win us over. From this point in the film takes the narrative on a basic downward spiral of drugs, sex and general excess to act as a sort of cautionary tale against the period. It does this a little heavily where I would have preferred it to trust me to get the message fro ma straight telling.
The character of Shane is the main focus, with him acting as our eyes on the other characters, particularly club owner Steve Rubell. While it tries to paint a big picture of all the excesses and broken dreams, mainly it only manages to do Shane well and the rest are sort of in the background and not as well drawn and involved as in Boogie Nights. It still works but it lacks the tapestry effect that would have improved it.
The cast are still pretty good. Generally I hate the bland and expressionless Phillippe, he is not a good actor and he generally leaves me feeling cold by his performances. Here, partly because he is our entry to the film, I thought he was better than he has been before. Myers is good although his presence may have been part of people turning up to the film expecting a crude comedy. He delivers his lines well and seems to enjoy having a straight role to play. Hayek is OK but Campbell has very little to do. The supporting cast are OK but the material doesn't fill them out beyond people who we know we will see the `curse' of 54 played onto, much like the `characters' at the start of Casualty who we know something will happen to.
Overall this is an enjoyable film that trades off it's good sense of time and place to cover the fact that the material is not as well written as it should have been. The action is too simple and the characters are not real enough. I hate to compare, but Boogie nights deals with a similar tale but does it much better.