Interminable, pretentious nonsense from a spent director.

Rating: Null/10 (25 July 1999)

Never has the gulf between a film's hype and its reality been greater. This would have been a guaranteed straight-to-video dud had it not also been newsworthy as Kubrick's last film, conceived and completed in pointless secrecy. Marketed as an intellectual sex romp it is as dumb as it is unerotic. It resembles nothing so much as a 60s porn movie without the porn sequences...which just leaves the wooden linking dialogue and static dramatic interludes that go nowhere. The movie's only real treasure is Tom Cruise's sensationally bad performance, all hesitation, long pauses and pained expressions. He was never worse and probably never will be, but this is surely the performance he will never live down. Summarising the plot is unnecessary: all you need to know is that it starts badly, gets worse and only when you are feeling a lot older does it finally end, abruptly and - appropriately - with an anticlimax.