Style cannot make up unoriginal substance

Rating: 3/10 (6 April 2001)

I saw this last and thought it was total and utter crap. The plot seemed entirely unoriginal, as if the screen writer thought that he could just borrow themes that had been presented in previous movies and novels(which had something to say about society not just a bunch of worthless junkies) and throw them over a bunch of rather unlikeable characters and boom, you've got an art house classic. To throw the viewer off from this we have a bunch of fun and new camera tricks, some of which are also heavily borrowed from other films(Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction for example), but these eventually seem to get boring and repetitive, how many times do we have to watch a closeup of drug preparation, method of ingestion, dialated pupil. As for the performances Jared Leto can't compare to the better written and more likeable characters that are presented by Ewen McGreggor in Trainspotting and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries. The other characters are convincing enough but that really doesn't matter because by the end of the film I wanted all of them to put a gun in their mouth and end their wasted lives, especially during the way to long climactic montage of them all hitting rock bottom. All in all, if you want to see a movie that says something more than just:junkies are losers, go rent Trainspotting or the Basketball Diaries. If you want to see what a hour and a half long music video looks like check this one out.