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Insomnia
(Reviewed May 23, 2002)
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What a disappointment. "Insomnia" director Chris Nolan's "Memento" was one of my top-10 movies of 2001, a completely original masterpiece of storytelling finesse. So even after I heard that this movie would feature Robin Williams (YIKES!), I held out hope. Even after I heard that this movie would feature Hilary Swank--whose work has left me so unimpressed in places such as "Beverly Hills 90210" and "The Affair of the Necklace" that I still cannot rouse myself to see "Boys Don't Cry" (so shoot me)--I STILL held out hope. I mean, come on, with the great Al Pacino in the lead and Nolan at the helm, how bad could "Insomnia" be?
Answer: Pretty bad. Not that you would know it from the hosannas for "Insomnia" that are emanating from nearly every other movie reviewer in America.
I really don't understand media-lunkhead critics who are so intellectually dishonest that they feel compelled to line up behind directors whose last work they praised despite what they see on the screen in front of them. Are all of these dopey Richard Roeper clones so insecure that they feel as if honestly assessing a stumble by a talent they canonized last time around would make them look foolish? I can think of no other reason why any writer would give "thumbs up" to a boring, unconvincing, seen-it-a-hundred-times-on-TV-cop-shows-before movie such as this one.
Al Pacino plays a cop-with-a-shady-past on loan from the city of Los Angeles to a burg in Alaska to solve a murder, which should set off your "dumbbell plot" alarm right from the get-go. As in, "Wha...???" In the movie's universe, I guess that Los Angeles is doing so well at wiping out local crime that it is magnanimously sending cops to other states that can't get their acts together.
Many details of the case itself add up to "Twin Peaks" without the irony (dead teenage girl, secret diary, out-of-town detective showing the ropes to small-town cops, dead girl's best friend secretly screwing dead girl's boyfriend). Unfortunately, irony is the only thing that can make stuff this stale seem fresh.
Pacino does things that are so patently ridiculous they cannot be neatly explained away by excuses as pat as sleep deprivation or I-secretly-want-to-get-caught guilt. ("Hey, I'm completely setting myself up by blabbing away like a fool to a ridiculously clever murderer, but there's NO WAY I possibly could imagine that he might be tape recording my every word.") The scene in which he bolts from an interrogation room to race the cops to an apartment where evidence has been planted is so preposterous it belongs in a bad comedy. And wouldn't at least one person in town (or, more likely, several of them) even bother to suggest that hollow-eyed Al might consider taking a sleeping pill if he's having trouble getting to slumberland?
As for the movie's ending...hoo, boy. Even if Hilary Swank could act, it still would be cornball.
So, what's good about "Insomnia?" The settings are stunning, both in aerial shots and in locations such as an isolated cabin, a fog-bound ravine and a log-choked river (where the best suspense scene in the movie takes place). Pacino is fantastic even with this unchallenging and unconvincing material; he looks as harrowed and glassy-eyed and bone-weary as I felt by the time the closing credits came up.
Why director Nolan chose this ho-hum, nothing-special project is beyond me. He wrote the script for "Memento," and it was a work of sheer brilliance. With any luck, he will get back to the keyboard and write his own next movie, instead of plucking another snoozer like "Insomnia" from the slush pile.
Back Row Grade: D
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