How do you take a 100 minute movie with Nick Cage, Larry Fishburne, Leslie Bibb, and Barry Pepper - as well as Cole Hauser, Adam Goldberg and Peter Facinelli - and somehow make an unwatchable stew of tones and over the top cliches? I think you give it to a TV director, TV writer, and TV editor.
I could not actually finish it. Even for me, that is pretty bad.
It is a series of scenes that could have been part of a TV-series, but they weren’t. They were just the beats from a TV-series. Maybe it was put together by some people who read the wikipedia article for “Traffic” (2000) - then sketched a storyboard for a telenovela - then remembered they were making a movie and just cut it back down from there. It is like it has been sequentially translated into 2 different languages, each time by someone who wasn’t a native speaker.
Set designs were thrifty, but not too cheap. Cinematography is somehow gray and lurid at the same time. If there was a highlight, it is the music. It was the only thing that informed me of what I was supposed to be feeling or thinking. I would not buy the soundtrack, but I wouldn’t turn it off if it was playing.
Something that made me laugh: when they introduced characters, they freeze frame and spelled out their role on the screen in animated letters next to them. For Fishburne, when he walked into the scene the words “THE MAN” were stenciled on the shot. A stronger case of nominative determinism has never been made.
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