Truly Awful (Watch Eternal Sunshine or Fight Club Instead)

Rating: 1/10 (3 April 2007)

This film is utterly, utterly dreadful! I urge you not to see it! It is chock full of plot holes and inaccuracies. The script is terrible, the dialogue is laboured and false sounding. I realise now that the film was originally produced in Spanish, however anyone with the remotest idea of how normal conversation works would have been able to spot some of the howlers within this film.
As I have said in the title of this piece, two films which tell similar stories to this and which do so much more effectively are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fight Club. Now on the DVD case, there was emblazoned the tag: "Memento meets Fight Club". I have not seen Memento, but I adore Fight Club, it is splendidly disorientating, and plays the two people as one thing very effectively. It tries and fails also to pull off the "beginning at the end" trick that Eternal Sunshine does so well. In a sense this film is a bad (very, very bad) amalgamation of these two wonderful films and should be avoided at all costs.
It literally throws its hat at Eternal Sunshine again in trying to set the whole film as a dream, but where Eternal Sunshine was able to be a dream but remain believable, this film is a nonsense from about ten minutes in until the end.
It also did the same thing as that film Crash, which everyone raved about and which even won 3 Oscars (including Best Picture) in 2006. At the end of this film, in a desperate attempt to pull all the characters' stories together so that they were 'interlinked', the writer threw them all into the same situation. The Machinist does the same thing. Because the story tries to be so confusing throughout, all the loose ends are tied up in the last few minutes. I dislike films which do this because they assume that people who watch movies nowadays cannot cope with any kind of complexity.
On the whole, after a promising first few minutes, this film is diabolical!