A meandering piece of awful

Rating: 3/10 (18 March 2004)

It's hard to imagine a more disappointing follow-up to Cameron Crowe's delightful, captivating "Almost Famous" than this confused disaster, which is long on long and short on everything else.
This is the kind of movie that needs a killer performance to "save" it--something to sink your teeth into and distract you from the fact that the story itself has little impact or interest. Tom Cruise can't do it--not that he's incapable (I actually think he's rather underrated), but the character is a loser of a protagonist. He's too self-satisfied early on and too self-pitying later to be even remotely likable. I like Jason Lee a lot, so I'm sorry to say that his tacked-on buddy character doesn't cut the mustard either.
Then we get to the ladies...OK, deep breath. I really, truly mean it when I say that Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz are probably the two worst actresses in Hollywood that aren't working for Vivid Video. On top of this, as luck would have it, they decided to reserve their worst respective performances for "Vanilla Sky." Both of them are positively grating. "When we come back as cats." I hope someone backs over you with their car.

Crowe deserves as much blame as the cast--he fails to inject any sort of urgency into the film--though probably not through lack of trying. For example, nice try switching the girls back and forth with alternate shots...too bad Spike Lee made much more compelling use of the same trick a decade earlier in "Mo' Better Blues." This movie didn't need gimmickry and trickery--it needed someone to grab hold of the story and really tell it. Instead, it sort of wanders along, and the big plot twist comes long after all our interest is lost.
A real bomb of a movie--avoid at all costs.