Slipstream

What would you do if you had a handheld time machine that would let you go back ten minutes? In Sean Astin's case, he uses it to perfect his pickup of the cute bank cashier he's been obsessing on for months. What he doesn't know is that FBI agents Ivana Milicevic and Kevin Otto have been trailing him as a potential security risk --justified, it seems, because he has removed the time-travel device from a national laboratory. And what none of them know is that Vinnie Jones and his all-British crew are going to rob the bank, gun blazing.

It's a very pleasant little story that would have rated high in the rankings in a mid-1940s pulp SF magazine of the better sort. Astin looks bewildered. Jones snarls. The others try to look effective, and it all sorts out satisfactorily in the end.

When I deal with sf, I try to look for the little things, and I was astonished at how much things have changed in the two decades since this was made. There are lines at the bank! The time machine is referred to as a 'PDA' (for those of you too young to remember, that was short for "Personal Digital Assistant")!

An interesting time-travel-correct-your-mistakes story with a lot of possibilities, unfortunately told by a director who seems to be far more interested in slow motion car crashes (and ludicrous gunbattles) than in telling a coherent story. It also doesn't help that the dialog is often laughable, and spoken too quickly and/or flatly (especially by Sean Astin -- but that too is the director's fault. I'm not sure van Eyssen was actually paying attention during dialog scenes. It's clear that if he was paying attention, he wasn't interested in it.)

Perhaps with a different director this would have been a clever little film, but alas not. This was filmed as if it was a very long commercial (indeed, the director's experience appears to be entirely in the realm of television commercials), rather than a conventional movie. Perhaps this style appeals to audiences whose attention spans are all microscopic (and so the fact that many scenes don't make sense even internally, must less to the rest of the movie) -- because they simply are incapable of noticing such flaws. But I sure as heck did.

For you budding directors who want to make films, please use this movie as an example of what not to do. Don't show off, don't try to be 'impressionistic' -- it's clear that the monumentally pretentious positioning and use of the camera was intended this way -- don't use flash cutting and vary the film speed just because you saw in in a Tarantino flick, a music video, or someone else's commercial. Just tell the flippin' story, OK?

... hey, mentioning QT: *that's* where I saw that whole stupid bank-robber subplot in this flick that didn't matter -- "natural born killers" (from me, this is NOT a compliment, by the way.) And I am STILL trying to figure out that whole cell-phone tower thing... But give this a pass -- a great little movie idea that didn't get the story-telling it deserved.

It's not as awful as some people think, or as good as a few think.

In fact, the average rating of 4.6 is about right. I'd give it perhaps a little lower, about a 4.

It never ceases to amaze me how a Hollywood director will spend millions, even tens of millions of dollars or more to produce a film, and try to create an illusion, and then shoot it all to heck by getting sloppy and sticking an obvious wrench into the believability. Without giving any spoilers, I spotted two very obvious believability wrenches.

This is a film with quirky direction. I guess they tried to make it different. Well, I guess they succeeded.

I call it a "minor" time travel tale because that's simply how it feels.

Slipstream obviously is a bad movie. Now there are two types of bad movies. The first is of the Steven Seagal-category: meant to be cheap fun, and that's what it is. Poor film-making, but somehow fun to watch. The second category is where Slipstream fits into: meant to be original, innovative and artful yet all you get is mere pretentious junk. A Steven Seagal-picture knows it's terrible but doesn't want to be any more than terrible. Slipstream tries to be terrific but is actually the opposite, so in the end it's annoying as hell. The whole movie you're thinking: whoever made this should be sent to prison for insulting the intelligence of man. To sum up some of the things that went wrong with this flick: 1) the director uses all kinds of advanced techniques, mostly derived from The Matrix, for no purpose at all (a little like Swordfish but a thousand times worse), 2) the acting is totally unconvincing, people dying everywhere and the protagonists behaving like nothing is the matter, 3) huge plot holes everywhere, 4) an incredible load of editing errors, 5) everything is ripped from other movies, 6) this is the worst thing I've ever seen, 7) you shouldn't watch it, 8) forget all the positive comments around here. Thank you.

Where do these good reviews come from? With words and phrases like "accomplished," "mesmerizing," "visually stunning," "reminds me of the best moments from Blade runner and 2001," "Astin acts his heart out." Sounds to me like some PR people are doing damage control on the old IMDb in the hopes they can salvage some kind of life for this film on DVD. "I can't believe it wasn't theatrically released." Well, I can, and we should thank the studio execs who decided to give this movie a basic cable burial. They did so to preserve social harmony. If the general public had paid box office price to watch Slipstream, riots would have surely ensued.

Make no mistake, people, this movie is BAD. The amazing directorial technique some seem to be so inexplicably impressed by is nothing but hack. Slow motion is used to signal the slowing down of time before a backwards trip, but it's also just used any old time to signify nothing other than the total running time needed to be longer to qualify as a feature-length film. Then there's the rotating camera. Why use the technique so much? Well they bought the rig, and darn it, they were going to use it. Stupid, horribly staged bank shootout? No worries, we've got a rotating camera. Stupid, horribly written and acted bus bathroom scene? No worries, we've got a rotating camera. And here's a dilemma, we've got two versions of a scene, one with the actors inside a car and one where they're outside, both are horribly written and acted, but we forgot to use the rotating camera. What do we do? No worries, we'll just inter-cut the two separate takes, and the lack of continuity will jar the stupider viewers into thinking that we "have a visual style." Yeah, that's right, I've been saying horribly acted. No one, in this movie is a great actor, by which I mean, has a great range. To the Astinites out there, sorry, but your boy is a serviceable actor at best. Without an extraordinary director and extraordinary writing, the mediocrity of Astin's performance is an unbearable distraction. He's had the good fortune to be in a few good movies in his career, but, left to his own devices, he will pick insipid little things like Slipstream simply because the script uses the phrase, "String Theory." This is a dangerous trait for a less-than amazing actor to possess. If he wises up, he will accept the role of supporting, character actor with grace. He cannot and should not attempt to carry a film.

To give a little credit to the actors, including Astin, there's not much you can do with writing as terrible as this. There are no character arcs to speak of, just starting points and end points. How did they get there? What's the motivation? Who could be that stupid? Who cares! Have you seen our rotating camera? And, to all you aspiring directors, when faced with a script with no feeling and actors phoning it in, don't forget to use slow-motion. It saves the writer from having to write something compelling and the actor from having to emote. The slower you get it, the more emotional weight a scene can carry. And if you manage to have a rotating camera with slow-motion, whoa boy! Oscar can't be far behind. Or at the very least, a BAFTA.

I've never, before watching Slipstream, felt it my duty to so harshly trash a film on the internet. I registered with IMDb because of it. Believe it or not, this is me at my most humanistic. Mankind should not have to watch this movie. If I can prevent one person, then I've done my part to make a better world.

For the love of all that is good, go rent Donny Darko and stay far away from the abomination known as Slipstream.