interesting failure

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2002)

It's nice to see Tom Cruise taking some risks lately, doing arty stuff like this movie and Eyes Wide Shut, and playing a drug addict in Minority Report.
But risks don't always pay off.
Vanilla Sky is a remake of the Spanish film Open Your Eyes, which I haven't seen. This is one of those movies where you're not sure if what's happening is real. I usually love this kind of movie (Jacob's Ladder is a good example of the genre), but Cameron Crowe messed this one up. It's hard to be affected (shocked, moved) by a movie that never goes beneath the surface of things. The characters aren't fleshed out, the relationships are never made believable, and the surprise ending has no weight - it may indeed be unexpected, but it is also rather uninteresting. The same concept was handled in a much less heavy-handed (and more entertaining and effective) way in Total Recall. I think the key problem is that this is a remake; I think Crowe could have done a great job if he had written his own original script. There are a few nicely surreal moments (such as the much-discussed Times Square sequence), but they are stranded in the middle of a failed experiment.
The best thing about this movie is the director's great taste in music - the soundtrack features excellent, well-chosen tracks by Radiohead, R.E.M., Sinead O'Connor, and The Chemical Brothers, among others.