Boring John Malkovich: Hype becomes Tripe

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2001)

Just because a movie is strange and original doesn't mean it's good. Sorry, artsy-fartsy poseur bandwaggoners, but it's true. Case in point: "Being John Malkovich," a motion picture with a bizarre but interesting premise that gives rise to a bizarre, fragmented, indecisive mess of a film.
The main character (John Cusack) is a down-on-his-luck puppeteer who lives with an unattentive, pet-eccentric wife (Cameron Diaz). Searching for a real job brings him to an office building with a "7 1/2" floor, where everyone treats him like HE is the nutty one. He meets an attractive co-worker and woos her, but she thinks he's a hopeless weirdo.
Then one day, after moving a cabinet to retrieve a document, Cusack discovers a small door that leads him on a crazy rollercoaster ride and lands him inside actor John Malkovich. It only lasts 15 minutes, but he is changed forever. He uses his new discovery as a way to attract his attractive co-worker, and soon they have people lining up to be John Malkovich like it was an amusement park ride.
That's about where any of the good stuff ends. The rest of the film is a confused convoluted mess of twists and strangeness so weirdly played you don't know whether to laugh or shake your head sadly. When a comedy is played so straight you don't know when to laugh, it's pretty bad. The same thin ruined USA channel's "National Enquirer" show.
I don't care how beautifully "Malkovich" was photographed, or how unique the script was, or how good the acting was. If they did a Shakespeare film dressed like the characters from "Sesame Street," it would be original but still crap. A drug-fantasy cooked up by the slightly-more sophisticated counterparts of Beavis and Butt-Head is all that this film amounts to. It can't make up its mind whether to be comedic or a social commentary satire, so it decides to just BE. So of course everybody ate it up.
If you want to see an actually deep, poetic and beautiful movie, watch "American Beauty." Pass on this trumped-up wad of nonsense.
*1/2 out of ****