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8MM
(1998) |
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After the Batman and Robin debacle, Joel Schumacher - the shop-window display assistant turned bigwig Hollywood director - returns to the big screen with a dark, seedy, violent thriller set in the sexual underworld. Nicolas Cage plays a private eye who takes on an assignment to try and discover what happened to a young girl who was apparently brutally murdered in a 'snuff' pornographic film (where one of the participants is actually killed during filming). The film instantly reminds one of David Fincher's thriller from a few years ago, Se7en. The major similarity is that both the films were written by Andrew Walker and explore the darker side of the human psyche. While watching 8MM, it constantly feels as if the writer is quite desperately, and unsuccessfully, trying to recreate the same ambience which he managed to conjure in Se7en. In the film, Schumacher takes the viewer on a tour of the porn underworld - a world of sleaze, degradation and sickness. Joaquin Phoenix tries to lighten up the proceedings with one-liners: "It's like a gas station here," he says of his sleaze shop. "You pay before you pump." However, these quips appear contrived and Phoenix comes across as a failed attempt by Schumacher to infuse some 'reality' to his depiction of the porn underworld. The film runs out of steam about halfway and degenerates into Deathwish-like reprehensible vigilante fare. Then follows an orgy of violence before the payoff scene arrives, with the admittedly chilling message that the most hideous evil lurks in the most unlikely places, and that many of the perverts of society are people whom their neighbours and relatives would describe as kind and caring. Yet the film doesn't really tackle any of the serious issues it depicts - illegal and depraved activities such as child pornography, snuff films, teenage runaways and prostitution. Ultimately, 8MM comes across as an exploitative, trashy version of Se7en. A very ugly film about the very ugly world we inhabit.
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