Home Movies

Rating: 1/10 (5 February 2005)

Why do I feel cheated. I tend not to believe film critics and make up my own mind about how good or bad a movies is. This time they are right. This was unbelievably bad. Absolutely awful.
Put it like this. When I go to a friends house, I would resent having to pay admission to watch their home movies made with their buddies swanning around some major European capitals looking cool and mugging at the camera whilst going through some makeshift plot.
Yet this is what a major studio has given us. Steven Soderbergh has put together a two-hour snooze of a picture, filming some of his buddies obviously having a good time with some artsy camera shots and editing tricks designed to push along the caper movie. Instead this film never thrills and I ended up wishing I got the hell out of there at the two-thirds point.
This was about the point at which Julia Roberts plays Tess plays Julia Roberts made you think that we were inside some Hollywood inside joke so inside that it made sense to those up on the screen. Add a completely pointless cameo by Bruce Willis then you kind of get the picture.
Morally dubious, a waste of some good actors (Clooney, Damon, Gould), some more exposure for bad ones (why is Catherine Zeta-Jones famous? Try and count how many times her Welsh accent disappears and re-appears), this film is a total waste of time from start to finish.
1 out of 10 (and I'm being generous)