From Art-House to Hollywood Failure

Rating: 4/10 (6 December 2004)

The low-key opening third of the film in which Parker's character and situation is explored and revealed is quite engaging. Maguire has a soft, laid back approach that is quite appealing. This feels like a real film with real characters. The surrounding characters are a little over-blown, but seen as a film about a real person living in a comic-book fantasy, they work well, and there is a healthy, knowing tongue-in-cheek intelligence about the film that pulls me in. But at some point in the middle when the action film section really gets going I realized that I had become bored. The film had lost the art-house feel of the opening, had become yet another Hollywood No Brainer with big action sequences, no character development, no surprises, just the usual crash scenes. It was hard to stay focused, and I wondered why and where exactly the awareness of the intelligent viewer had been dropped. Certainly Molina plays the villain with wink-wink, thigh slapping gusto, and there is enough humour and drama in the ending to make most readers forget the tedium of the the middle third. But considered as a whole the film failed for me.