not nearly as good as the original, but a good try

Rating: 6/10 (1 June 2003)

Slight spoilers may be in this... but if you don't know by now...
Background before I go any further: I'm a big C. Crowe fan - but he needs to stick to originals. I saw Abre Los Ojos first, though it's been almost a year since I saw it. I'd been avoiding Vanilla Sky because I'd heard awful things about it. I just caught it on cable.
Overall, not *that* bad. I thought Jason Lee was great, Cameron Diaz once again plays the psycho well (Very Bad Things was a very bad movie, ha ha, but she shone in it as a psycho as well.) Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise (eh), and Penelope Cruz is so much better in Spanish films, but I could deal with her here much better than in Blow. I still like the story - if you have a problem with suspension of disbelief, avoid this as well as the original. It was true to the original at least in that much.
The bad parts: A little too long, a little slow, and some rather bad choices in musical moments. (I like most of the music chosen, but they didn't always fit well into the scenes. It was almost as if someone was just trying to point out how much they knew about music...) The biggest problem I have with it though is only in comparison to the original. Crowe over-explains the whole thing. I don't remember there being that long of an ending in the original - there was explanation, but it didn't take as long to explain somehow... I think it was dumbed down a bit, maybe as a reaction to what the American audiences tend to want. It was almost insulting - you could figure out what the next sentence was going to be, what the explanation for each element was (trying really hard to avoid spoilers here) before they actually got to it. After they explain the splice - there's really not much more that you have to have spelled out. Though maybe with having seen the original, that's just how it feels...
Anyway - 6 out of 10. Not great, but not awful either. Better watched on a lazy Sunday evening on cable than having paid for any of it... :)