Slightly better than Jaws 4

Rating: 3/10 (26 January 2007)

LA CONFIDENTIAL 1997 (KEVIN SPACEY, RUSSELL CROWE, KIM BASINGER) DIRECTED BY CURTIS HANSON ~ THE RUNDOWN: Apart from a juiced-up cast and a slick image, there is absolutely nothing worthwhile about this vastly overrated movie. ~ Okay, I saw LA Confidential right around the same time I saw Jaws: The Revenge, and I can honestly say without joking that this wasn't much better. To back up my outrageous opinion on this movie, I have comprised a list that I will present of why this movie sucks the big one. ~ 1) The premise of the movie is just plain dull! The basic story/concept is ridiculously stupid, boring and pointless, with almost no imagination whatsoever. Nothing of what we are offered draws us in therefore making the act of watching the movie a chore. 2) The script, like the basic story is just bland. Nothing in it has any redeeming value for the viewer; no wit or humor, not enough violence to make a stink; stale, washed-up dialogue...nothing that even begins to entertain. It is very muddled, however, and does succeed at purposely confusing us to try and hide up its retarded, brain-dead story until everything falls oh-so nicely into place for the breathtaking finale...ha, yeah right! 3) There's no originality here, and once you get down to it, this is really just another Tarantino/Pulp Fiction rip-off, not even a good one that. Except, of course, there's no Tarantino! Nope, instead you get the blazing originality of Curtis Hanson, Mr. Lifetime Movie himself. 4) Not an ounce of style is to be found anywhere in the general proximity of this movie. None. That's right, none. So what if it looks good visually? It doesn't even begin to innovate in story or otherwise. Sure, it tries embarrassingly hard to set itself apart with the whole Film-Noir B.S., but the only real category it falls into is your average, commercialized, Hollywood trash category. If you think there's style to be found here, maybe you have a sixth sense for it because I couldn't detect any. 5) For this fifth point, I will draw a comparison between the movie's cast and a baseball player named Barry Bonds...they're both on steroids. Yeah, basically, the overblown acting ensemble of the movie (Spacey, Basinger, Crowe, Devito, Straithairn, Pearce) is absolutely wasted. There are great actors in this movie but their skills are wasted and not challenged at all, making their performances meaningless. The roles that they play are generic and turn these fine actors into robots for the entire length of the movie. 6) Kim Basinger is effin weird. ~ In the IMDb.COM trivia section it says how this was supposed to be a TV show starring Kiefer Sutherland. Ha. Well, I am quite confident this particular episode of pointlessness and boredom would not have made the greatest hits compilation.