A Mess

Rating: 2/10 (18 August 2002)

Cameron Crowe finally confirms what's been suspected for quite some time--that's he's a shallow filmmaker with limited range and visual sensibilities--in perhaps the worst film produced by a major studio this past decade. Crowe reunites with star Tom Cruise to deliver a meandering, incomprehensible fantasy (based on Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 film, `Open Your Eyes', unseen by this reviewer) about the price of beauty and it's easy to see the appeal this theme would have to an actor whose career has been defined by his classic good looks. But Cruise has neither the intellectual prowess nor the acting chops to incite any curiosity (indeed, he spends half the time mumbling through a prosthetic mask or grisly facial makeup) and Crowe seems to want to do little else but indulge his star in wild bits of overacting. As usual, Crowe's staid writing style makes everyone else (including Penelope Cruz, Kurt Russell and Cameron Diaz) look bad too: each performer has some bad dialogue to deliver at one point or another and is forced to do it in an embarrassingly earnest way. Crowe, after incomprehensibly trying--and failing--to position himself as Billy Wilder (you can't be Billy Wilder without mingling romance with cynicism and Crowe doesn't appear to have a cynical bone in his body), seems to be setting himself up as a mixture of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, but he's far too pedestrian a filmmaker to capture the essence of either director and the result is a trite, talky, open-ended mess that ends up becoming little more than an ersatz science-fiction mess--albeit with a great soundtrack. You could spend hours trying to decide what it's `about'--and Crowe would love nothing more than to have you do just that--but it would be a waste of time because, other than the vanity thing, it's really about nothing at all. The harsh shock editing is by Joe Hutshing and Mark Livolsi and they destroy the decent, if uninspired, work turned in by cinematographer John Toll. No matter--nothing could overcome Crowe's dull cinematic style anyway.