Shallow Pretentious Overlong

Rating: Null/10 (7 May 2004)

Val Kilmer gives a dead-on impersonation of the self-destructive singer Jim Morrison in this big-budget rock bio-pic by Hollywood's favorite rewriter of history: Oliver Stone. This mistitled film -- it is about Jim Morrison, not the band -- has a great look, but suffers from being shallow, pretentious, and overlong. Not only do you never get to the bottom of Jim Morrison, this film never even shows you why Morrison's life was worth depicting at such expense. Perhaps director Stone meant to show how the eternal battle between the world and the creative muse can destroy a sensitive artist, but he only manages to show that Morrison was a jerk who sealed his own fate. Unless that was Stone's intention, the film is failure. It is a pity indeed that the film didn't rise to the level of Kilmer's performance.