The emperor's not wearing any clothes (**)

Rating: 5/10 (24 October 2003)

Well, I hate to have to say that "the emperor's not wearing any clothes", but with all the critical acclaim that this half-baked, mediocre movie is getting, it's necessary.
Not that it's bad, it's not. Just cold, plodding, and unfulfilling, and it has a twist ending that is more than a little ridiculous.
Jimmy, Dave, and Sean are 3 kids growing up in Boston and are close friends. Then one day, as they're playing in the street, Dave is abducted by two men posing as police officers and sexually abused for several days.
The story then moves into present day, with Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon playing the characters as adults. They all still live in the general area, but are no longer close friends, having grown apart over the years and going down different paths. Jimmy is a former hoodlum trying to put the past behind him. Dave is now a husband and father, but a hunched wreck of a man as a result of his childhood trauma. Sean is a cop with an estranged wife who keeps calling up (a useless subplot).
After doing a good job setting up the characters and locale, the movie becomes a murder mystery when Jimmy's teenage daughter is found shot at bludgeoned to death.
It's tough for me to be too hard on this movie, because the cast (which also includes Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, and for about 5 minutes, Laura Linney) is so terrific, and all of them give great performances, especially Robbins. The score is good, the cinematography is good, hell, even the TITLE sounds like it should be a great movie....but it's not.
The most obvious flaw is that the story moves at about the speed of a glacier. I was very into it at first, but somewhere over the course of its 137 minutes, I went from paying close attention to the story to admiring the ceiling of the theater.
Second, even though the actors do a great job of playing the characters, the whole thing still felt hollow to me. Apart from one scene where Penn breaks down on his porch, I didn't really FEEL anything for any of these characters (except maybe Robbins). It's a very cold, distant movie, which I totally didn't expect.
Most damaging of all though is the climax. Without giving anything away, the explanation of how everything happened at the end is completely ridiculous, using coincidence to an extreme that is almost insulting. That's more a fault of the book it's based on than anything, but it's still a lame finish for a movie that seemed like it was saving all its energy for the climax.
It's not one of the worst movies of the year or anything, but it's absolutely one of the most disappointing.