Do yourself a favor. Go watch the trailer, think to yourself, "Wow, that looks like it might be a great film," and leave it at that.
I've never been a huge Brian De Palma fan, and I should have remembered that when I went to see this film. I kept thinking that it might be as fun as Snake Eyes was, but I also kept conveniently forgetting the disaster that was Mission to Mars.
The movie is� well, crap� How can I say this without including major spoilers? Oh hell, It deserves to be spoiled anyway: [MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW THE JUMP] The movie is all a dream. Well, most of it anyway. Early on, after stealing $10 million worth of diamonds (embedded in a gold snake haute coture "top"), Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is mistaken for someone else, and falls to her near-death. She wakes up in this someone else's life, decides to take a bath and falls asleep in the tub. There, she dreams of her future, a life of crime, and in the end� she dies.
Then� she wakes up.
The movie starts back over where her dream started, and I pray that it's real this time, because by this point I'm beginning to wonder if this movie is ever going to end. It is, and she does the right thing this time� the right thing being stopping the girl whose life she woke up in from killing herself. Then she goes on to have a wonderful life, including getting the fenced money from her diamond theft, saving the life of another of her friends, and the death of the co-thieves she double-crossed in the pre-dream era. The moral of the story apparently being, no matter how evil you were in your past life, one act of kindness will transform your life into sweetness and light, and all of your enemies will die horrible on-screen deaths.
Ms. Romijn-Stamos looks very pretty up on the screen (indeed, my theory is that this entire movie was an excuse to shoot her prancing around near naked for a significant portion of the film), but the sad fact of the matter is that she needs acting lessons. Antonio Banderas was completely wasted as a photographer whose only purpose was to die as a patsy in her dream. Perhaps if either of these actors were able to make me care about their characters, I would be giving this film a few more Vivid Tangerine iMacs. Oh well.
:: 2002 :: dir. Brian De Palma :: 