Couldn't follow through.

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 1999)

This movie started out with a great idea. Imagine being able to climb into a famous person's head and live their life with them for a few hours! But herein lies the problem: I'd rather be anyone besides John Malkovich. Who really wants to be John Malkovich? How about Being Jackie Chan, or Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson? Why not someone other than an actor, like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, or Oliver Stone? Why not a world leader like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jiang Zemin, Gerhard Schroeder or Kim Dae-jung? Why not a woman? Why someone white? Could we find SOMEONE more interesting than John Malkovich?
This movie started out as a funny movie. The poor puppeteer can't find a job as a puppeteer, so he goes to an office located in between floors in something akin to a finished crawlspace, built ostensibly for midgets and only accessible by stopping the elevator between floors and prying open the doors with a crowbar. Serious dialogue is incredibly funny when one is hunched over bumping his head on the ceiling and talking over the ringing bell of the elevator while delivering it.
The movie gets tedious quickly, however. A bizarre love-triangle/square develops and that drags the movie, along with a few other suspension-of-belief-rupturing developments into the zone of the bizarre and boring. Had this movie shied away from the totally demented and stayed closer to the humorous, it would have been, in my opinion, a much better movie.