Overstays its welcome by about an hour

Rating: 3/10 (7 November 2005)

The problem with HIGH FIDELITY is that it's already starting to look dated, and it's only five years old. The core problem is that it emerged from a very late-nineties cultural phenomena, that of the 'new lad' (i.e. men who think it's okay to be self-serving, self-indulgent slobs who treat women like dirt then laugh about it with their stagnant social circle over a beer) and its worthless offspring, 'lad-lit' (as in literature), which got a bunch of narrow-minded book critics raving over the ability of mediocre hacks like Nick Hornby and David Baddiel to pad a life of porn videos, football matches and failed relationships out to the length of a slim paperback. Another core problem with lad literature is its nerdy obsessiveness. Hornby could fill page after page with anally-retentive statistics regarding his favourite football team in the name of "authenticity", and nobody complained once. Bret Easton Ellis did a similar thing when he listed is-he-or-isn't-he psycho Patrick Bateman's endless array of gadgets and gizmos in American Psycho, but he was at least poking fun at the vacuous consumerism of the yuppie crowd - with Hornby, it all seemed depressingly real, as if he honestly believed people gave a stuff about what an anorak his lead character was. (I dread to think how many tedious conversations he's been cornered into by similarly inadequate football geeks.) HIGH FIDELITY does itself no favours by relocating the story to Chicago and getting John Cusack to play himself yet again (though I'll always think of him as playing his Better Off Dead character when confronted with this kind of shtick, but that's another story), but the real problem is that the film is way too long. It would have been entertaining as a one-hour TV special, but at its current length it drags, particularly after the halfway mark when the screenplay really seems to drag its heels, throwing in endless diversions and sub-plots that lead nowhere. And maybe I'm being overly picky, but would a music snob like Cusack's character really like someone as populist as Bruce Springsteen? Surely he'd have gone for Tom Petty, who did at least sing a lot of songs about girls rather than cars or redemption by water or whatever nonsense 'the Boss' is grumbling about half the time? Ah well...