Tom Cruise reunites with Jerry Maguire director Cameron Crowe to remake the 1997 Spanish film Open Your Eyes, with Penelope Cruz reprising her role from the original and Cameron Diaz the other member of the love triangle you might mistakenly believe the film centers on. Instead the film straddles several genres as it unravels the backstory of Cruise�s spiraled descent from media mogul and playboy to disfigurement and incarceration as a result of falling for Cruz (to the dismay of his casual partner Diaz) while the bitter members of his company board try to usurp his power.
By the end of the film, after the romance, crime mystery and confusion, I was wondering if anyone other than Cruise and Crowe could have pulled off a pitch along the lines of �It�s a remake of a Spanish flick, kinda like Total Recall meets The Game meets Perfect Blue. Oh, by the way, have any of you guys ever seen this old episode of Red Dwarf?�. And just as you�d expect from that mishmash, it does get very complicated and tangled in a pleasantly un-Hollywood fashion, although I don�t understand how so many people seem to have come out the cinema confused when it�s all explained pretty damn clearly at the end (perhaps too condescendingly�if only the guy hadn�t opened his eye it would have been a killer pub debate).
It�s certainly flawed, with one too many pop references, frequent drags in a long running time, is occasionally too muddled for its own good and the ending is perhaps a little too out of left field (mind you, compared to A.I�). For some people this might amount to too much, so you�ll probably get a really polarized audience. And I don�t mean the ones who want to see Cameron�s talent and those who want to see the other Cameron�s talents, nor the ones who went to see Cruise and those who went to see Cruz�s jugs.
Cruise is very good in his role, maintaining interest in his plight despite the fact his character is an utter twat. Diaz is not on screen long but when she is it is as an effectively unsettling obsessive, while Cruz does better than I expected as one of the few characters you are actually able to like and is only let down by the occasional stumble over her English. Unfortunately I found Kurt Russell�s psychologist to be quite an annoyance and clich�d in his I-really-want-to-understand-you preaching. As for Crowe�s direction, he seems to enjoy a break from convention and handles the changes of genre quite well but as before this pales compared to his ability to pick a soundtrack � Sigur Ros and Spiritualized? Who�d have thought it? |
