I was underwhelmed.

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 1999)

Like any serious student of film for me "Eyes Wide Shut" was easily the most anticipated film of the year and maybe the decade. Stanley Kubrick directed my favorite film of all-time, "2001", another Top 10, "A Clockwork Orange", and all-time classics, "Dr.Strangelove...", "Paths Of Glory" and "Full Metal Jacket". But alas EWS falls far short of those dizzying high points. It begins brilliantly with a fascinating and dreamy party where the psycho-sexual landscape is set up as precisely as a chessboard and the play is engaged between Dr. Harford and his wife Alice. The opening moves are typical Kubrick and therefore masterful, but then it devolves into a game I really didn't care about. The much talked about orgy scene looks like it came from Red Shoes Diaries. There are some great looking bodies in it (even in the altered US version --which is another story in itself), but what was intended to be shocking was less adventurous than things we've seen on HBO's Real Sex series. I didn't care about Harford and his wife. Tom Cruise does well with what he can in his role but like most of Kubrick's main characters he is an icon rather than a real person. Stanley has gotten away with this more than any other director in history, but here it doesn't work. Nicole Kidman is the best thing about the movie but she dissappears in the second half of it except to come on in time to utter what will go down as one of the most memorable closing lines ever. Kubrick's death is a huge loss for film and filmgoers. His passing hit me harder far more than Di, JFK Jr. and John Lennon, but it doesn't make EWS more than a better than average movie. I would've love to have seen AI.