Most boring movie EVER!

Rating: 1/10 (17 March 2004)

What's there to say? This is a movie in which nothing happens. And it happens to a bunch of utterly uninteresting nobodies. Bill Murray is supposedly engaged in "understated" acting. Mostly he looks like a man either bored to death, or in one weeklong Valium trance. His counterpart, Scarlet Johansson, is lost in some sort of existential fog. Maybe these are the kind of people who relate to this movie, and thus find some sort of deep, meaningful message in it. I don't.
The whole premise is these two are in Japan for a week, he to shoot ads for a local liquor company, she to basically do nothing while her husband, a famous photographer, also shoots ads. They're both stuck in the same plush hotel, so they hook up. Sort of. Mostly, to the extent they do anything at all, they commiserate. She's unhappy with her marriage. He can't even muster up that much energy. He drinks a lot (making him, at least, a good pitchman for his product). Together they, um, well, do stuff. I guess. About the only thing memorable was where they hung out with some Japanese party animals, one of whom does a (bad) Karaoke rendition of a Sex Pistols song. Oh, the hell with it, merely trying to describe what this movie is about is such a dull process it's putting ME to sleep. Better simply to describe what's wrong with it, which is to say, just about everything.
First off, Bill Murray doesn't even remotely resemble what he's supposed to be, a washed up action movie star reduced to doing commercials in Japan. Instead, he comes across as some middle class nobody, a salesman perhaps, forced to spend a week abroad on business. Which brings up another complaint. This film comes off as if these two actually live in Japan, and are finding it difficult to adjust. Which would have made far more sense, but a week? Anyone can put up with being in a foreign country for a week! But most important, there's absolutely no dramatic tension at all. The closest they come to doing anything scandalous is when they share a couple tepid kisses at the very end. And she, wandering around in her philosophical haze, could have come up with something more dramatic than visiting a Buddhist temple a couple times. How about a suicide attempt? A big fight with her husband when he's sucking up to the hot, blonde starlet (who I mistook for Cameron Diaz, turns out she's played by Anna Faris, of "Scary Movie" fame)? Something, anything!
Oh well. This movie plays like "American Beauty", if you took that film and sucked it dry of everything funny, weird or erotic. That film, while somewhat pretentious, was at least interesting. In contrast, one gets the sense that this film wants to be pretentious too, but it simply lacks the energy.
1/10