This is actually worse than I remembered, and that’s pretty bad. There’s one scene in this which I really remember pissing me off badly when I saw it on the big screen, and that’s the Top Gun homage “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” scene, one of my earliest and only memories of almost walking out of a movie. I’d previously remembered my reaction to this scene and thought, ‘oh, I was just being miserable me and over-reacting,’ – but no … it really is as bad as I thought. And the rest of the movie ain’t much better. While Laurie Metcalf is pretty hilarious (and not the only movie she was good in that year – her bit part in U-Turn could crack me up till the cows come home), and the opening, while a little hokie, is pretty cool, the movie as a whole feels far too episodic and just doesn’t gel together as well as the first. Then there’s the score, and can we say temp score hell? I think when I first watched this movie I actually really dug the use of Hans Zimmer’s great Broken Arrow pieces … but only because I didn’t realise they came from that movie. When Marco Beltrami actually makes an appearance it sounds mostly either like Bernard Hermann’s Cape Fear or just the original Scream. I guess he spent all his time on the Greek play bit, lol.

The cast is pretty noteworthy though, I mean, it says a lot about how old this movie is that it features Sarah Michelle Gellar pre-Buffy, Portia de Rossi pre-Ally McBeal, Rebecca Gayheart pre-Dead Like Me (oh look at me, the TV buff all of a sudden! lol), and a lot of other people really just on the brink of the big time. So I guess it does at least have a historical purpose.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 5:12 am in 2 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.