 Wonderland (2003) Which is a shame, since this movie could have been a lot cooler than it turned out to be. Val Kilmer plays John Holmes at the end of his career, trapped in a truly nasty period of cocaine abuse and ever more seedy situations, leading to his involvement in a brutal quadruple murder. Hm, could there be a non-brutal quadruple murder? Yes! Smothering four sleeping babies would do the trick. The mystery of Holmes's exact role in the slayings has never been fully discovered, and Wonderland relies on a straight-out-of-film-school use of Rashomon's structure to propel the mystery—the events are recounted from different perspectives to keep the audience guessing as to what truly went down. It's the same trick that made The Usual Suspects beguiling, but where that film managed to taunt and tease you with shifting truths leading up to one brilliant revelation, this one simply throws all the facts into a blender and throws the pulp at the wall to see what sticks. Sadly, most of it just runs down the wall, leaving a streaky, staining mess. Josh Lucas delivers a simply astonishing performance as a manic coke dealer; he's so riveting that it actually distracts you from the fact that the movie isn't very good. Dylan McDermott is unrecognizable, and terrific, as a complete scumbag (and I'm frankly surprised to have something good to say about Dylan McDermott). These performances are strong enough to make the otherwise dull storytelling worth a look. The rest of the actors range from bland to just bad. Kilmer is alright as Holmes, not particularly believable, though not over-the-top—his performance falls somewhere between those from his other biopics, The Doors and Batman Forever. Eric Bogosian is unconvincing as an Arabic nightclub owner who sets up the murders … why he has become the go-to guy for strung-out, amoral sleazebags is a curious step for his career. Lisa Kudrow is terrible as Holmes's estranged wife, and Kate Bosworth (from Blue Crush) is totally forgettable as his teenage girlfriend. Christina Applegate, Janeane Garofalo, and Paris Hilton have cameos that are so undistinguished I wondered why the casting director bothered getting name actors for the parts. The biggest weakness of Wonderland, though, is simply its pace—for a movie about coke-fueled robbery and murder, it's painfully slow, much more like waiting for drugs to arrive than being high. And while the story itself is captivating, the depiction is nothing that hasn't been done a million times since the gun-wielding Alfred Molina paced the floor in Boogie Nights. Amazingly, the 7-minute "Court TV" featurette on the real-life story of the Wonderland murders (tacked on to the DVD as a bonus) is infinitely more satisfying, interesting, and informative than the film itself, illustrating that this story is much better to simply know about than to portray dramatically. Also included on the DVD is raw police videotape footage of the original crime scene … this stuff is truly grisly, and a bold inclusion, but again, it serves to illuminate the belabored and irrelevant speculativeness of the film. There's so much padding to it all that they might as well have called it Wonderbra.
Review by La Fée |