"Stealing her passion was a risky affair" grandly but falsely proclaims the print ad for this fumbling black comedy, a terminally arch, self-indulgent exercise in unoriginal filmmaking.
Patrick Dempsey stars as Billy, alternately described as a "legend in his own neighborhood" and "misguided...possibly retarded," who robs a bank to buy trinkets for his girlfriend Selina (Olivia d'Abo) from a home shopping network. Laying low in a seedy L.A. hotel, he dreams of taking Selina
away to Mexico. Selina, however, hates the trinkets and spends her spare time having tag-team sex with Billy's best friend and his best friend's brother. Meanwhile, the bank has overstated the amount stolen tenfold, to compensate for opportunistic embezzlement, and Billy's pictures, caught by a
bank security camera, are splattered all over town. Everyone begins to take advantage of him, from the front-office clerk (Michael Jeeter) who charges $100 to change a light bulb, to a TV newswoman who bursts into his room with her crew for an interview. Also interviewed is Selina, who tearfully
declares that she's breaking up with Billy because he's a loser. The only exception is call girl Priscilla (Lisa Bonet), who stays the night but only charges him for an hour because the bank Billy robbed had foreclosed on her mother's mortgage. Billy's sanity begins to crumble in what may or may
not be fantasies of abusive situations. Deciding to rob another bank, he is shot by two cops (Judge Reinhold and Forest Whitaker). For a fee, they deliver what's left of Billy to Priscilla, who drives him off into the sunset promising to get him fixed up.
Debuting writer/director Nick Mead must have called in many favors to get this film made because there's simply no other plausible explanation for why it exists at all. The surrealistic style and conceit of setting a man's breakdown in a dreary hotel room is a blatant rip-off of the Coen
brothers' BARTON FINK, but that's where the similarity ends. The Coens used the premise to effectively explore the agony and alienation of the creative process, bringing a sharp, dark humor and style to burn. Mead's film is a single- and simpleminded sophomoric whine of despair against modern-age
maladies--slutty girlfriends, self-absorbed newswomen, whatever else happens to come into his scattershot line of fire. Throughout, the targets are easy and the thrust of the satire as doggedly unoriginal as everything else about the film.
The cast is game, but they largely seem to be under the illusion that something resembling art is being created here. The real losers are the investors and anyone spending a video rental fee and the time to sit through this annoying drivel, which, despite its NC-17 rating, is more offensive for
its inept derivativeness than for any of its frequent scenes of sex and violence. (Sexual situations, profanity, nudity, substance abuse, violence.) leave a comment
