10 years later and we're still here?

Rating: 1/10 (11 April 2006)

I thought that, after so much time had passed, I could go to the theater with an easy mind and an open heart, unburdened by fears of another Tarantino knockoff. Back in the day, I sat through more than a few. And I'm not just talking about that one with Charlize Theron. Anyone remember Bulletproof Heart or Love and a .45?
Needless to say, my hard-won innocence was betrayed. To the writer Paul Porizkovich, or whatever your name is, wheedle as many lunch offers at the Ivy as you can, because you'll be back in whatever bilgewater you crawled out of soon. I'd have more respect for someone who went around spray-painting babies than I do for you. Are there really still people walking around Hollywood thinking, "I have a great idea! I'll make a gangster movie like The Usual Suspects or Pulp Fiction, but in this one the wallpaper'll be really funny!" When are those Iranians going to enrich their uranium already? Oh, they just did.
The only member of cast and crew who comes out of this one unscathed is, shockingly, Josh Hartnett. He's also the only one who is still building a career and can be forgiven for appearing in such roadkill. The one smart move the director makes is to have his character's nose broken so that Hartnett's resemblance to Jean-Paul Belmondo becomes unmistakable. My girlfriend says he's the only male actor that she has a crush on, resulting in much scoffing from me -- too bad she refused to see this movie where she was unexpectedly vindicated. He gets the full star treatment here and pulls it off as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Despite his reputation as a grunting caveman with a unibrow, even Woody Allen couldn't have recited this verbal diarrhea any better. And I'm talking lines like, "It's a condition I have called ataraxia" and "Did anyone tell you should never put the word you're defining in a definition?" and "On your face, there's a nose, and underneath that nose, there's a mouth."
Everyone else looks like a waxwork in a museum about to be burned down for the real estate. Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman do their overrated shtick which basically amounts to rolling vowels around and being poised and boring to show their almighty experience before the camera; both of them need to either take a huge risk or go away fast. A facelifted Bruce Willis brings back horrifying memories of Billy Bob Thornton's uncreased new visage in The Ice Harvest ( their faces now resemble children's hindquarters. ) And Lucy Liu goes for Young Shirley MacLaine but, flitting around the decade-younger Hartnett, comes off more Old Asian M.I.L.F.
Without breaking a sweat, Hartnett wipes the floor with all of them -- and if that isn't more tragicomic than anything else going on in the story, then I'm Paris Hilton's latest conquest.