OXYGEN It's not, I'm afraid, a gas, gas, gas Poor Maura Tierney, a seemingly talented actress who has to live with the baggage of being the most cute and cuddly (-seeming) woman on TV, more or less constantly since her NewsRadio days. If she tries to play further into that, she'll box herself into a tiny corner from which she'll never escape. If she tries busting out of that, she risks making a movie like this. I can't tell if this is an acting triumph or just a shaky script, but Oxygen actually manages to give us a character played by Tierney who not only isn't likeable in the least, but you can't even imagine anybody liking her, not even her own mother. While she's on ecstasy. It's the ol' race-against-time-to-find-somebody-who's-been-buried-alive plot, with Tierney playing a New York cop who finds herself embroiled in the case. The lady in the casket has 24 hours of air, though I seem to remember hearing a few times that in an enclosed space like that, carbon dioxide poisoning will kill you before a lack of oxygen will. It's not a matter of finding the badguy (Adrien Brody), since he's apprehended fairly early on, but a matter of getting him to talk - and he makes it plain from the beginning that he's not going to give up his secrets easily. Is this one of those villains which has planned every last detail of how the movie unfolds to his own advantage, like some sort of omniscient mastermind? Uh, yeah. Many problems with this movie, many problems. For one thing, it keeps apologizing for itself. An FBI agent launches into a good monologue about a governor, which degenerates into a bad monologue about lethal injection, to which the villain responds, "God, that was a stupid monologue!" Later, when all sorts of bad pop psychology starts getting brought up, the script (by director Richard Shepard) apologizes for it again. Tip: if you have to apologize for it, it shouldn't be there. The dialogue is...well, let's call it unlikely. At any point in your life, have you ever even considered uttering the words "Let me buy you an ice-cold Coca-Cola"? If you were looking over a graveyard, would you actually dare to say "Somewhere in this sea of cheap tombstones..."? I might, but only if I knew nobody was listening. That, I guess, brings us to the characters themselves. The movie spends most of its time on Tierney and Brody. Tierney, as I said, is just impossible to like here; I know, you don't have to be likable to be compelling, but it helps to be likable when you're NOT compelling. I'm sure that somewhere around the script stage it seemed like an interesting character angle to make her character a closet masochist who sneaks out behind her husband's back to have some guy in a hotel (with a big Canadian flag hanging out front) put out cigarettes in the crook of her arm. As it plays out, it just doesn't work. But I can't imagine how anybody thought that the villain in this film would've been interesting to anybody; sure, he names himself after his idol, Harry Houdini, and he fancies himself an escape artist, but he clearly just wants to be Hannibal Lecter. There's even "You answer my question, and I'll answer yours" stuff where he tries to get into the cop's head. Oh my GOD, there's even one shot where she literally sees herself in his eyes, I swear to God I'm not making this up. Oxygen isn't terrible, it's just bland, and dull, and predictable, and...man, that's some bad dialogue. Looks great though, like it wasn't even direct-to-video (it was). Shepard needs somebody else to write his scripts for him. BACK TO THE O's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE