You just know that Stanley didn't want to go out on THIS note

Rating: 5/10 (7 August 1999)

As a dyed-in-the-wool Kubrick fan, I'm aware that the closest Kubrick ever came to depicting sex was the docking sequence in "2001" but I bought into the hype and figured that if Stanley was going S&M and Tom and Nicole were along for the ride this was going to be AN EVENT. What I got instead was 45 minutes of Kabuki theatre accompanied by Gregorian chants and a piano that was missing 87 keys, and another 2 1/2 hours of Stan's Greatest Hits. There were pieces of "Clockwork", "2001" and "Full Metal" sprinkled liberally throughout the proceedings in the form of camerawork and pacing. Probably nothing wrong with this movie that a good hedge trimmer couldn't cure. This puppy D--R--A--G--S! Unfortunately, some impressive acting by Nicole Kidman and a great little bit by Alan Cumming gets lost in this ponderous opus. A miscast Cruise and a script that ostensibly is about obsession, dreams and reality never gets the viewer to a clearer understanding of how they are connected. One can sift through some of the more obvious nonsense and sort of see where Kubrick wanted to go, but, like riding the Long Island Railroad, it's just a long, hard way to get there. Considering the body of work that Kubrick left behind, "Eyes Wide Shut" has to rank as a disappointment. We've lost one of the great American originals, a truly visionary director, and it's seems a shame that his swan song should be one of his lesser efforts.