Last days of disco movies?

Rating: 5/10 (24 February 2002)

It seems that making the definitive New York disco movie is a lost cause. Both Whit Stillman's `Last Days of Disco' and Christopher's `54' make valiant but doomed attempts.
The problem with `54' is, like `Last Days' the characters lack depth. But perhaps this is no accident given the artificiality of the scene both movies set out to portray. Compared to ballroom dancing, or to be more accurate, `Strictly Ballroom' where the environment is populated with people dedicated in their own individual ways to succeed, the disco scene is a hard seam to mine.
Whereas `Last Days' focuses on regulars who frequent the disco, here we focus on an employee. `54' takes as its central character Shane O'Shea (Phillippe), a New Jersey kid who is bored with life on the wrong side of the tracks, or, more accurately, the wrong side of the Hudson River. So he crosses into New York City, joins the queue of hopefuls hoping to be allowed into `54', and manages to get in by the rather unlikely process of removing his shirt (a scene recalled towards the end of the movie when he is thrown out of the same disco, again shirtless). From here on we follow his rise as an employee to the dizzy heights of bartender, a position that in the world of disco appears to be equivalent to a leading Wall Street bond trader. Phillippe is too lightweight in the role for us to really care too much about his fate.
Mike Myers makes a reasonable stab at playing the role of Steve Rubell, `54's charismatically odd owner. Unfortunately he has a tendency, in several scenes, to look a bit like the toothy British comedian Ken Dodd and I was half expecting him to come out with Dodd's old saying `How tickled I am, missus'. Given some of Myers's lines it might actually have been worked.
In the end Rubell is hit by the IRS  given the amount of drugs being wheeled and dealed in the place he probably got the lesser of two evils. And as Ken Dodd also got into a little bit of difficulty with the UK's revenue service the parallels were just too much.
All in all, like `Last Days of Disco', this is a sorry effort. Perhaps the whole Manhattan disco scene can now be quietly condemned to the trashcan of movie history.