With most of his other work‐The Fog Of War, The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, and the short-lived TV series "First Person"&dashErrol Morris has demonstrated a knack for extrapolating broad and deep universal meaning from the tiniest, almost imperceptible moments or the off-the-cuff statements from his interview subjects. In these small, almost between-the-lines moments, real and thought-provoking human truth is revealed. However, with F, C, & OOC, Morris extrapolates to such a broad theme&dashnothing less than the meaning of life&dashas to render his statement utterly generic. It's almost like he was trying to make a movie about everything. It doesn't help that Morris attempts to define the meaning of life via four unusual men about whom most people wouldn't give a rat's ass. Profiling a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a mole-cat specialist, and a robot scientist, Morris attempts to inflate some very specific comments about these people's lives into the very largest of statements … about us all. And while I appreciate any attempt to understand life and death, too often, the film strays into "who cares" territory: mere fodder for the art-house crowd. Morris aims to draw big connections between his subjects and universal truths about life, but more often than not the connections seem obtuse and forced. The film fails to attain the depth of statement Morris achieved to much critical acclaim in The Thin Blue Line and which he would brilliantly top with The Fog of War. The quirky subject matter here, though, would really have been better suited for "First Person." It's like four episodes of that show woven together in an attempt to explain existence. Perhaps I just don't want to view my humanity through the eyes of, say, a wild animal trainer. I hugely admire Morris's work, and certainly this film bears the distinctive stamp of his elegant humanism, but in the end Fast, Cheap, & Out Of Control is just too esoteric. Though well-intended, it's the film equivalent of a GRP CD sampler: boring, pointless, random, and appreciable mostly by dulled-down intellectuals. The minimalist soundtrack was already a documentary cliché long before 1997. (The circus music that crops up on the soundtrack is amusing, but irritating after awhile.) Often, the "failures" of a great filmmaker are to some extent more intriguing than his or her masterpieces … say, F For Fake vs. Citizen Kane, or After Hours vs. Apocalypse Now. Other times, the failures are just boring. Fast, Cheap, & Out Of Control thuds squarely into the latter category.
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