TDeMona

The stench of neon lights in a sinful city street are always interesting to me, and these are the elements this film promised. On that front it absolutely delivered, but what else? The movie takes place, as the name suggests, on one night in a decrepit hotel. One positive I can say is that the hotness of the summer night is absolutely palpable in this piece.

The story is about an old crook who gets out of the prison. His best friend, our main protagonist, has a plan to move to Las Vegas and start a new, legit life with the money he has managed to save. But the old jailbird's blood flow's too hot and he kills a prostitute in anger. Now the duo must get rid of the body before the buss leaves and before this messes their shiny new future before it even begins.

That's a nice premise and all, but few things stuck up like a sore thumb. First of all, the recently released character is a complete jerk, and thus as a watcher it was rather difficult to accept our main character's necessity to keep this parasite out of responsibility just because, we are told, they used to be mates. The main dude himself was fine, but a more three dimensional sidekick would have made a more balanced double act so that a viewer would not want anything bad to happen to either of them.

Secondly, neither of these old crooks really develop as characters throughout the thing. The movie just ends and doesn't really resolve anything - as if they would have started to free ball the script without any idea where they were heading.

Actually much more interesting than the main story is a B-plot about a young, empty headed girl whom a slippery tongued pimp (Vinnie Jones) half cons to become a prostitute. The girl is completely at lost inside her tough interior, but luckily meets an older harlot who takes her under her wing. This particular hooker is the best and most positive character in the film. Their plot line actually goes somewhere, which is welcome.

Other good stuff: the world of the film is made nicely pathetic and slimy. This is good. The drunken idiot who works the hotel's reception is a fun character. The almost "Weekend at Bernie's" -style corpse charade by the main duo at the end part of the film goes into a total farce. This, and other humour is good to balance out the darkly lit nihilism.

Unfortunately, in the end the result is still somewhat forgettable. The drama never ascends the smallness of it's characters which became rather numbing after a while. Also we had slowness and nothing really happening at times. It isn't, by no means, a horrible film and one can still do much worse.

Naturally the only reason to watch this for me was the fact that it had Sharon Stone in it. Unfortunately, though I was expecting absolutely nothing, I somehow got less.

The movie takes place within the rustic country side, in the world of the rednecks, the folksy, "The Real America. The Small Town America". Thusly it must belong to the "city idiots move to the country side and get buggered, either literally or figuratively, by hicks" -genre. This is not merely flogging of the dead horse anymore, but waving your whip over the nearest glue factory. Yes, Deliverance was and is a brilliant film, but it also contained such elements as a plot, some common sense, mood and characters you didn't hope to die from the word go.

The story is, in all of it's generic depression, this: Sharon Stone and her husband, a documentary movie director guy, move out of the city since their children are either bred wrong or it's just natural selection that makes them run in front of cars like it's going out of style. They manage to find a huge Wayne's Manor with it's own forest, the yard the size of a golf course and a swimming pool for about $3,50, since "it's foreclosed, yo, so the bank sells it real cheap like". But who would have know, the former owner shambles in looking for a job.

I hated this character from his very first scene. And I don't mean that he is written to be a hateful character; I mean I am amazed how it is possible to write such a generic, pointless, irritating and uninteresting main antagonist. Of course also the dad starts to immediately hate this newcomer and this feeling is mutual. The audience merely hates everybody, since they are all equally boring, pretentious, over reacting bunch of monkeys.

My very favourite series of events begins when the redneck dude saves the children from a snake that is in the pool. When he himself gets fired, the whole house is suddenly full of snakes. And every family member magically places their hands on the slimy buggers at the exactly same moment. I can hardly imagine the mountain of Oscars that must adorn the window sills of the responsible parties' trailers. And somehow the horrendous musical score manages to make this embarrassing mess even stupider than it already is. Which is an considerable effort.

Of course the movie is also eternally long. After 30 minutes I had spent all my hospitality, but the thing just keeps chugging along. To my peer Sharon Stone fans: let it be known, that she does what she can with the stuff she is given, but her role could just as easily be played by a marionette made out of dead rats. Juliette Lewis is also present, wasted like everything else.

In the name of honesty I have to report that there were few rather decent scenes near the end, and they bothered to even pay off some of the things that are set in motion. This is good, because almost an hour and a half is used to nothing but these preliminaries. Also, the ending is so sickly anticlimactic and the zenith of predictable, that even the makers of silent movies would have laughed it out of the room. You could easily foretell everything that happens, and usually it looked better made and more visionary in your mind.

So, this was, in a word, wretchid. I was lucky I saw it on the television and didn't pay a dime. Even though I would like to urinate on my audiovisual equipment just to make sure no remnant of it remains within my apartments threshold.