What a bomb

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2001)

A Tom Cruise vanity project: incoherent, senseless, confused and overlong. Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous was a delight, but Vanilla Sky's script, direction, casting and editing are a mess. Looking for SOMETHING a group of six friends could go to this weekend in San Diego, I nixed our seeing Sidewalks of New York as I'd heard it was endlessly talkative, and foolishly suggested we try Vanilla Sky instead. Well, some of our group thought this movie the worst in years. More boring than House of Mirth, more absurd than Eyes Wide Shut, more obscure than Memento and more embarrassing than Quills, we suffered to the end. When I couldn't take it, I looked at the floor or audience. Cruise's toothy smile is bad enough but his distorted car crash mask is harder to take. Penelope Cruz seemed vacuous--supposedly better in the Abre Los Ojos original, which I've not seen. Kurt Russell as a shrink is a joke, and only Cameron Diaz seemed adequately cast, though she's not on camera long enough. (For charisma, she easily trumps Penelope Cruz.) Plot motivation is thin, the music's an arbitrary rock hodgepodge, editing is MTV-style, and the film's muddled concept perhaps appealed to Cruise due to his belief in Scientology. 1 out of 10.