Borrowed Body

Rating: 4/10 (13 January 2007)

What happened to Martin Brest? This is a director who knew how to channel excessive actors and extract something palatable from them.
Here he takes on an opposite challenge: what to do with subtlety and understatement? Brest is completely lost.
This stuff is so thin, we get nothing more from Pitt than his borrowings from his own character repertoire, particularly his bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold from "Thelma and Louise". Hopkins plays it more or less as his "Bounty" captain/tyrant persona.
And the premise is somewhere between "Being There" and "The Seventh Seal". Brest has no idea of how to tap into Bergman's angst, so he attempts some Kubrickian inertia. No dice there either. The lakeside party is filmed in the manner of "The Godfather II".
I suppose this makes fine chick-flick grist, what with all the facial close-ups on Pitt during the love scene. But this does nothing for me; no irony, no narrative games, just parts of better predecessors on loan.