Just Horrible

Rating: 1/10 (21 January 2005)

Possibly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It reeks from start to finish, which is all the more painful because it was supposed to be good. Edward Norton sounds and looks more like the president of the Yale Republican Club than a white supremacist skinhead - the movies truly fatal flaw considering he's the linchpin of the whole thing. Elliot Gould as a woolly, ineffectual liberal is a stereotype, one of many in the cast.
More troubling than the acting, though, is the direction, which could charitably be called confused. How else to explain why we end up rooting for the skinheads to beat the black guys in a basketball game to determine who will stay off the public courts of Venice for good. How else to explain that the skinheads actually win? On the Venice courts, where the level of play is so high that Ron Shelton actually set his own movie there ("White Men Can't Jump")? This scene is symbolic of how completely out of touch this movie is, how it ignores basic realities to construct its own while purporting to tell the truth, and how confused its storytelling and direction are. If racism is so bad, why are the majority of the black characters so unlikable, and why do the white supremacist characters seem so much more sympathetic and their actions so much more understandable? These concerns would be mere quibbles if the movie didn't claim to be so much more than it actually is. It fails to convey its message, and it fails artistically. Everything about it just sucks.