Film Number 30 – 8mm
Joel Schumacher’s attempt to resurrect his reputation after 1997’s disastrous Batman & Robin was met with modest reviews and a disappointing domestic box office. Working from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en) Schumacher directs Nicolas Cage as a private detective who is hired by a very rich recent widow. Whilst looking through her wealthy late husband’s possessions she finds a roll of 8mm film that shows a woman bludgeoned to death in a pornographic nature. Nic Cage’s job is to find out whether this is a real snuff film or just staged, Cage accepts the case and leaves his loving family behind to work on the case. He holds up in a cheap motel and watches the film; unfortunately this part of the film is one of the worst. It is a strange scene because we as the viewer know that although horrific in nature this film is not real, so basically the impact is lost and the moment is watching Nic Cage do his best squirming to a bunch of staged violence. Cage gets an image of the girl in the film and references it through stacks of missing person’s records until he finds a match, he goes to the girl’s house and the mother tells him that her daughter Mary-Ann left for Hollywood to become a star and hasn’t had contact for years.
Cage follows the trail to Hollywood and meets Max (Joaquin Pheonix) a sex shop worker who leads him into an underground epicenter of sexual depravity; Cage goes through subterranean smut markets passing vendors peddling porn of rape, child and other despicable fetishes. Clues come together and he manages to find those responsible for the film, Cage discovers that the girl was in fact killed and that his life is now in danger. Events slowly unfold and it turns out that the rich man had hired these pornographers to make the film, Cage tries to frame the killers by making another snuff film but events go out of control and one of the three killers as well as Max are all killed and the only copy of the film is destroyed. Cage then tells the wealthy widow about her husband’s horrendous crime, prompting the women to commit suicide in disbelief; he realizes that he cannot get the police involved without any evidence and that it is now up to him to kill the remaining men. He calls the worried mother, tells her that her daughter is in fact dead and asks for permission to punish the men that did it. She agrees and Cage takes the permission to exact vengeances and kills the remorseless murderers.
For starters I have to commend all those involved for having the sheer balls to put this story on film, it’s a sick world that Cage has to delve in and the themes dealt with are controversial and hard to watch; it’s no wonder that the film is so badly thought of. The clues that Cage follows are really well inserted into the story as well; at one point he finds the brand name of the film stock in a single frame and manages to trace it to a single location and is able to look through the transaction records leading him to one of the killers. There are huge problems with the film though, for instance the beginning ten to fifteen minutes concern Cage traveling to Miami; we are presented with extensive establishing shots of Miami all so Cage can complete a mission and move on; this giant exposition is very frustrating as he never ventures back to Miami and it also doesn’t tell us very much about Cage’s character. It is 15 minutes of filler that slows down the film and feels very boring, a bad start indeed.
Cage’s character is very interesting, the idea seems to be to show the journey his character goes on; we are meant to see what exposure to this world does to this loving family man, what killing can do to a normal man. The idea of permission for killing the bad guys is a difficult one to grasp, you get this feeling that redemption is irrelevant to this character after the shit storm of evil he has witnessed. The actual snuff film is without impact and it may have been more effective to have not shown it all and maybe just rely on sound, Cage’s reactions to watching the film are not correct and the whole scene needs a lot of work and I don’t know how you could make it effective. It is an important scene that must be in the film but it needs to be disturbing and it is not executed well in this.
Cage is good in the main role, he is watchable but the character defiantly needs a lot of work. One of the best things about the film is the reasoning that is given for the old man to commission the snuff film, “he made the film because he could” another brilliantly original, sick and horrific way of saying absolute power corrupts absolutely.
For all its faults I have to look at the film with a lot of respect for trying something original, it was a challenging film to watch and I’m sure to make. The only way to make it a solid film would have been to make it even more repulsive but then I don’t think I would have been able to watch it. It is a shame that Schumacher ever did get involved with Batman and not just Batman fans; I think people forget that he is responsible for some great films, The Lost Boys and one of my favorite films – Falling Down. He can make some great films and it’s not that this is a terrible film it’s probably just that it should have never been attempted. There was too much money wrapped up in this film and too many high profile actors for this ever to be the perverse morally challenging film that I’m sure Walker intended it to be.
6 out of 10 for being daring and trying something new.
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