Not surprisingly, Kubrick continues to herd sheep from the grave...

Rating: 5/10 (28 June 2003)

After over a year of production, Stanley Kubrick came up with a final bone to throw at the slobbering sycophants--er, FANS--who elevated him to a godlike position among filmmakers. With "Eyes Wide Shut," the director's sterile, detached style reaches an unfathomable low, as he literally sucks potential vigor and excitement out of his own movie during its 159-minute transfusion. Therefore it is hard to blame the actors for the film's lack of importance (and interest)--neither Tom Cruise nor Nicole Kidman can feign drunkenness (or other highs) convincingly, and their performance as husband and wife feels uncomfortably self-conscious. It doesn't speak too well for Kubrick when his best-staged scenes involve Alan Cumming and Sydney Pollack embarking on expositionary monologues when he gets bored with ogling his bland stars. The director's death only helped fuel the hype about "Eyes," but the perceptive viewer won't find much to get excited over--every inch of the female anatomy is lovingly examined during the much-ballyhooed orgy scene, yet is drawn-out, numbing, and base compared to something like "Blue Velvet" or "Crash." The pretext for Cruise's descent into the baroque sexual underworld--Kidman's admission of an 'erotic' daydream--is rather improbable, resulting in a weak payoff in the last act. Granted, there are some moments that hooked me in, but the trance was only fragmentary. To many, "Eyes Wide Shut" was interpreted as a fitting epitaph for a great director--to me, it just amplified an overrated one.
4.5/10