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| DIRECTED BY |
| Chris Ver Wiel
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| STARRING |
| Christian Slater |
| Tim Allen |
| Portia de Rossi |
| Richard Dreyfuss |
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So is this what cinema has come to? It seems as if after all of these years, original ideas have come to such a shortage that fledgling filmmakers have to shamelessly rip off other films from past years. In this case, director Chris Ver Wiel didn�t even try to cover it up � he simply created a whole character � a movie-loving hitman (how believable) to act as an excuse for his lack of originality! And then there�s the story itself, which is pretty much an idiotic version of Frankenheimer�s �The Birdman of Alcatraz.�
There were possibly two moments of this film that I enjoyed � a very creative overhead shot that shows Christian Slater and Portia de Rossi leaning against the same door from different sides and when Tim Allen tells Christian Slater that he sounds a lot like Jack Nicholson (a pretty funny inside joke.) But nearly every other second of the film consists of idiotic and unbelievable conversations between stereotypical characters about other (infinitely better) movies such as �Deliverance� that the filmmaker probably had with his fellow clueless film school friends and he probably just thought that it�d be kind of funny to stick it in his own crappy movie along with some hairpiece jokes to boot. And every other second of the movie consists of trying to make death look humorous � stupid characters get shot in their forehead while the tiresome romantic subplot schleps forward.
It�s almost entertaining to watch Richard Dreyfus as he tries to pretend that he�s not in a horrible movie. And fellow Newfoundlander Chris Doyle � coming off of quite an excellent performance as the serial killer in �Frequency� � is completely wasting his time by taking stupid roles in equally stupid movies such as this one.
