A Strange Combination

Rating: 7/10 (25 August 2002)

This film is a surprising and strange combination. It starts as a kind of crime psychiatric story, gets fast into the rich-boy-has-all-and loses-all track, drives through many sentimental twisted with Tom Cruise split between the beautiful but brainless singer (Cameron Diaz) and the intellectual true love Spanish dancer (Penelope Cruz) and towards the end turns into something very different that I will not describe in order to avoid writing a spoiler.
The film has surprising twists. Its main problem is that it is too long - it could have been a much better film if it was 20 minutes shorter. American directors did not learn that long shots are effective in European movies only because they are backed by psychological depth. Even so, the length of the plot and some of the flat acting (Kurt Russell for example) are compensated by the intriguing development at the end of the movie. As a viewer I was rewarded by the sentiment that I saw something different than the usual banal stuff, even if my patience was badly tried.