Slipstream

Just watched this on DVD. Potentially a good idea, spoiled by woeful direction and some of the worst acting I have seen outside of a school play. Sean Astin puts in a reasonable performance and Vinnie Jones tries hard, but the rest of the cast was appalling. It's almost as if the principal cast was signed up, locations scouted, and then they knocked on doors at their locations and asked people if they wanted to be in a movie. The story had promise but it all fell in a heap. Awful. Time travel movies can tend to be disjointed, but if it's done well it all makes sense in the end. This makes sense it just doesn't seem worth the effort of watching. I ended up sticking with it till the end and was not rewarded for my efforts.

An interesting time-travel-correct-your-mistakes story with a lot of possibilities, unfortunately told by a director who seems to be far more interested in slow motion car crashes (and ludicrous gunbattles) than in telling a coherent story. It also doesn't help that the dialog is often laughable, and spoken too quickly and/or flatly (especially by Sean Astin -- but that too is the director's fault. I'm not sure van Eyssen was actually paying attention during dialog scenes. It's clear that if he was paying attention, he wasn't interested in it.)

Perhaps with a different director this would have been a clever little film, but alas not. This was filmed as if it was a very long commercial (indeed, the director's experience appears to be entirely in the realm of television commercials), rather than a conventional movie. Perhaps this style appeals to audiences whose attention spans are all microscopic (and so the fact that many scenes don't make sense even internally, must less to the rest of the movie) -- because they simply are incapable of noticing such flaws. But I sure as heck did.

For you budding directors who want to make films, please use this movie as an example of what not to do. Don't show off, don't try to be 'impressionistic' -- it's clear that the monumentally pretentious positioning and use of the camera was intended this way -- don't use flash cutting and vary the film speed just because you saw in in a Tarantino flick, a music video, or someone else's commercial. Just tell the flippin' story, OK?

... hey, mentioning QT: *that's* where I saw that whole stupid bank-robber subplot in this flick that didn't matter -- "natural born killers" (from me, this is NOT a compliment, by the way.) And I am STILL trying to figure out that whole cell-phone tower thing... But give this a pass -- a great little movie idea that didn't get the story-telling it deserved.

This is the kind of movie that could be decent, but becomes unwatchable because the director's so in love with his/her techniques. The plot's not groundbreaking, but it is different from most time travel movies where you keep going back in time. Unfortunately, the director likes the soundtrack and sloooooow motion so much he keeps using it over and over, resulting in something you may enjoy if you love meaningless pontification on our existence or what-not. That is, the film doesn't provide for it but David what's-his-name probably wants you to ponder and reminisce during the frequent slooow-motion rewinding of history. The premise is hard to believe already. It's a shame he decides to be clever with techniques. Over and over and over again.

Slipstream obviously is a bad movie. Now there are two types of bad movies. The first is of the Steven Seagal-category: meant to be cheap fun, and that's what it is. Poor film-making, but somehow fun to watch. The second category is where Slipstream fits into: meant to be original, innovative and artful yet all you get is mere pretentious junk. A Steven Seagal-picture knows it's terrible but doesn't want to be any more than terrible. Slipstream tries to be terrific but is actually the opposite, so in the end it's annoying as hell. The whole movie you're thinking: whoever made this should be sent to prison for insulting the intelligence of man. To sum up some of the things that went wrong with this flick: 1) the director uses all kinds of advanced techniques, mostly derived from The Matrix, for no purpose at all (a little like Swordfish but a thousand times worse), 2) the acting is totally unconvincing, people dying everywhere and the protagonists behaving like nothing is the matter, 3) huge plot holes everywhere, 4) an incredible load of editing errors, 5) everything is ripped from other movies, 6) this is the worst thing I've ever seen, 7) you shouldn't watch it, 8) forget all the positive comments around here. Thank you.

The first 10 minutes had me thinking this was one of the worst movies ever produced. As it went on it became more watchable and evolved into a quirky sort of interesting movie. There were some seemingly pointless scenes and some artsy for artsy sake bits, but the plot itself as well as some of the effects were actually pretty decent.

As for the acting, Sean Astin was as good as Sean Astin gets, take that for what it's worth and the seemingly unknown cast was fair with only a few who were brutal actors.

Overall, this was an interesting free watch, I might have walked away from a theater scratching my head mind you :-)