depressing morality tale with sledgehammer shock tactic approach but nothing new to offer

Rating: 3/10 (27 August 2007)

Well I finally got round to watching this. I have to say it's rather overrated, and that's putting it mildly. It reminded me of 'Traffic' or any other overblown TV-movie-esquire morality tale over which I've wasted my time in the past. Just because a film is photographed really well (this certainly is) does not make it worth all these 10/10 ratings. I've read in the discussion comments that some people have shown this film to 6-9 year olds - I hope some day they feel as ashamed as they should. Scaring kids with this kind of sub-'Reefer Madness' paranoia-fest is going to ultimately have precisely the opposite effect that you think it should.
Some others here have pointed out some of the frankly unrealistic depictions of drug culture in this film. Here's just a few that I noticed - the mass drug distribution scene in a supermarket storeroom (give me a break!), not being able to score drugs in BROOKLYN (err... hello?), the fact that all the characters look straight out of a glossy teen magazine all the time (there's an easy way out of your money problems guys... join a modelling agency). One of the few traces of snot came with Harry's mom's legal-amphetamine disaster.. oh wait, it's because she's (whisper) 'ooold'.
Can I find anything good to say about this film? OK, it sets out the fact that addictions are bad (who ever tried to argue otherwise?), and that sometimes the most horrible addictions are legal ones (although not as bad as skag because it can make you into a hoe or lose an arm). And it does this powerfully. However the story is, at best, a horrific worst-case nightmare scenario, the likes of which only the truly vulnerable and lost are going to fall prey to - that or the criminally stupid. If this is the case, sooner or later something is going to destroy your life anyway... it's just a matter of what you have access to. Judging by the ratings, I thought this film was going to offer something more real, perhaps something about what causes people to do this to themselves (aside from maternal issues... sigh..). The real tragedy of this movie is that it does not.
Hmm so anything else good about this movie? The acting is at least functional, worthy of the best TV-movies. The photography and general production is, as already mentioned, unarguably great. The thing is, if anyone could be bothered to research such stuff, I think they'd be able to trace the sheer lack of any creative progression in modern western cinema back to the time that jumped-up music video and TV advert directors were first allowed onto a feature film set. That and too much cocaine. If anything this film proves that the film industry definitely needs a whole lot less cocaine.
The director here clearly is fascinated by paranoia/terror and representing it with twitchy jump edits. Technically good and initially arresting but it doesn't make a watchable film, and loses its intensity when it's done as much as it is here. To be honest the director comes across as a pretty negative guy, who prefers to apathetically wallow in tragedy and gloom rather than offer some real positive answers. His first film, Pi, was similar, and similarly over-rated. It seemed to me that he had an unhealthy fascination with the humiliation of the girl.. maybe the only option was to be more extreme than anyone else because this storyline has been done about 5818948923 times? Overall it looks like the director realised that by far the most profitable demographic for DVDs is angst-filled teenagers who thrive on spending their student loans on banquets of melancholy like this.
Sorry to be so brutal but really, there are far, far better films out there about this kind of subject matter which won't try and pummel you into a state of feeble submission ('Trainspotting' is a good example). I guess I'm just annoyed that I wasted my time... seriously, what is the point of sitting for 1.5 hours to be shattered by horrible tragedy that doesn't actually bear any resemblance to the real world, and doesn't offer any answers as to WHY this kind of thing actually happens sometimes? Maybe the thing that really bothers me is that most modern American films, even the so-called 'independents', seem to be so utterly empty and binary in their subtlety - there is no room for anything at all between vacuous air-headed garbage and morose doom-fests. As long as you dress it up with some slick photography and editing, and throw in some beautiful looking people, audiences will lap it up and ask for more.