A Disaster!

Rating: 4/10 (17 May 2001)

David Lynch still has made more beautiful than bad films, but his batting average is dropping dramatically. With "Mulholland Drive" he has managed to shoot a clunker that's so bad, you can't even have fun mocking its badness. Lynch was never great in storytelling, but his films had a compelling, addictive quality to them. It's not that there's no recognizable logic in the plot of a young actress coming to Hollywood and being put in the middle of a strange case of mistaken identities - it's that you never fall into the surreal, dreamlike atmosphere "Blue Velvet", "Wild at Heart", "Eraserhead", even "Dune" and "Lost Highway" had. Even more shocking is the horrible acting, pacing and lighting of the film, which give "MD" an amateurish look and feel. There's one scene, in which a supposedly professional criminal messes up a job. First of all he takes too long to get rid of his principal victim - who therefore has time enough to give what is quite probably the worst performance you've ever seen in a film by a respected director. Then the killer has to get rid of two bystanders, and the quality of the jokes is up there at the level of "Police Academy 7". Thanks a lot, indeed.
In comparison to "Mulholland Drive" Lynch's dumb movie version of "Twin Peaks" seems like a masterpiece. That's how bad "MD" is.
Why can't we give 0 points out of 10?