Too bad it wasn't done in the style of a "Vox Populi", since that's about as much as I could've taken of what this particular vampire had to say.

Rating: 4/10 (19 July 2011)

When we begin, we begin with a quite wonderful opening crane shot detailing the night sky of San Francisco before rearing downwards onto the embittered road level; the camera moves through an array of people on a street lit only by the meekness of an array of tall lamps, as various folk are pushed through with a real sense that the track is trying to get somewhere specific, as if trying to look for someone. Alas, we settle on that of a motel room; a cut to within revealing that of a man standing with his back to us gazing motionlessly out of a window, as a second man jitters together some sound equipment with a far more animated disposition. If the opening crane shot instilled this sense of looking or desiring somebody to zero in on, it is a shame that it is the man whose story is eventually told we've had selected for us; Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire a grotesque spectacle, a spiralling, idiotic freak show of a movie without merit nor a drive for the unabashed and quite disgusting places it goes.
It is Brad Pitt playing the titular vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac, a man who claims to have lived as far back as the late 1700's and is on the way to being immortal, all of which was born out a certain meeting with a certain someone whom gave him unspeakable ability under this guise of what many refer to as Vampirism. Here and now, in the late 1980s, he meets with a reporter named Molloy (Slater) to lay bare his tale, a character fronting the titular interview; Molloy very much acting out the role of the audience in regards to probing certain quandaries and reacting to certain revelations. Jordan's film is little more than a repulsive, flitting circus side-act feeding, if you excuse the pun, off a core premise reading: "there's a vampire in contemporary times – he's had to kill people to live but never felt good about it; he's lived for two hundred years, and stuff's happened during that time." Whilst later helming 2005's more rounded and, in comparison to this, certainly more successful Breakfeast on Pluto, as a curiously offbeat male hopping from instance to instance; from locale to locale, some stranger than others; some funnier; some scarier, not once are we provided any stone-wall reason to get behind Pitt's du Lac nor find anything of what happens in Interview with the Vampire remotely anything more than a big, fat and bloody waste of time.
We begin with du Lac's life taking a turn for the worst when he looses his wife and child, suicidal ideation then following before he meets that of Lestat; a vampire whom does what is necessary to turn du Lac into what he is, doom him to immortality but essentially grant him a new "lease of life", so to speak. It is Tom Cruise playing Lestat, an overly encroaching role for a man we usually rather enjoy watching, or indeed backing, in whatever predicament in whatever other film we've seen the man in - a role here which we have precious little pleasure in watching him play, and one in which he brings an aggressive amount of overacting to proceedings. Through a lot of blood; some frayed morals running in sync with a lot of flayed other stuff, du Lac succumbs to his torn mindset and comes to kill a human being in order to survive.
Life as a vampire sees these curious beings waltz around sporting big, bulging eyes; veins all over one's face and neck and generally look a little worse for wear as is. In spite of this, they are a big hit on the social scene and especially with the women of the piece. Du Lac and Lestat whisk from one place to another, du Lac's desire to spare human's and seek a more concrete understanding of life as a vampire seeing his philosophical demeanour in stark contrast to that of his friend and rival's lust for blood and misogynist indulgences which often lead on to an array of agonising female death's misguidedly precipitated as cinematic spectacle. Issues open up with the introduction of Kirsten Dunst's character Claudia, the indulging in her relationship with Cruise problematic if only because that old "unreliable narrator" scourge rears up; an hour or so has gone past and nothing in this guy's life has changed, we're continuing down the blood-lust trail full of murders, of which nobody else around appears to notice, and everything's just a bit gooey and unpleasant.
Long after Pitt's character has 'died' within, the film has died on its feet; a deeply unpleasant film covering what is effectively just a lot of killing and nonsense dressed up with tonally self-important voice-overs and this sense of the grandeur: a lot of time goes by, he travels the world; meets an array of people, some die and some do not – all of it amounting to very little bordering on absolutely nothing at all. As du Lac questions his own existence and reasons for presence in this world as what he is, we begin to question why it is that we're all hearing his banal tale at all; a flimsy, misjudged biopic of somebody whose premise for coming about to even exist looses weight very quickly and just becomes very dull on top of what is a bloody, episodic chore covering a great deal but doing very little. The similarly constructed Forrest Gump arrived in cinemas mere months prior to Jordan's mess, a genuinely humorous; fun; life-affirming piece hopping through the ages with a joke every other thirty seconds covering this man's life from one instance to the next - begging the question: why stand when you can sit?