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Joanna Going (you know, the woman who looks like Jami Gertz) and Rose McGowan are sisters who discover Going's small town is all dead or vanished. Enter sheriff Ben Affleck (yes, Golden Globe winner Ben Affleck - FOR SCREENWRITING! You'd think he would have recognized the missing elements in the script) and his deputies, a guy who dies pretty early and Liev Schreiber (Screams, Walking & Talking). They bumble about in a macho fashion, Schreiber giving us far more character than he was written, and Affleck looking totally out of sorts in a big winter coat and cowboy hat. Our theory was that he did Chasing Amy, figured it would tour the indie circuit and disappear, and took the first "big screen" job handed to him, not imagining the hubbub over Good Will Hunting. Ah, youth.
The sad thing is (oh, dear readers, it gets sadder), the actors are giving us the best they can in a ludicrously boring movie. I can only fault them for accepting the job, and I know first hand how hard it is to turn down a job. Enter multi-Oscar nominee Peter O'Toole, in an eerie art-imitating life capacity as a respected scientist now writing for a tabloid to pay the bills. Oh Peter - whence Lawrence of Arabia?
The biggest laugh in the movie was generated by disgust with the Sphere preview and the ridiculous voice over for the upcoming Caught Up. Continuity was forgotten, never mind all the excessive silliness. I noticed a dead kid was named Tim Lindsay and the bullets were Lindsay and Lindsay brand - was that supposed to be important? |
